ryanwold.net - Civic Tech, Bitcoin, and Open Government Innovation

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Recently, I built a feature in a Rails web application to take payments for an annual subscription service. There are many options for accepting credit card payments available. I was encouraged by a colleague to consider using Stripe.

A day later, I was happy I did. Able to accept payments in a PCI compliant way, the feature was quite a pleasure to build.

I found these resources particularly helpful:

* https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/charges
* https://github.com/stripe/stripe-ruby
* https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com/blog/life-of-a-stripe-charge

### A rundown of how it works.

* Use a basic html form and add `data-stripe=attributes` for Credit Card, Expiration Month and Year, and CVC number
* Use jQuery to handle the form submission instead of the browser's default form handling
* In the browser, use `Stripe.js` to generate a one-time use token from the 4 credit card fields (the library provides methods for it)
* Send the one-time use token from the browser to your Server. I used jQuery's `$.ajax` function
* From your Server, send the token to Stripe using `stripe-ruby` .gem, and create either a `Customer` or a `Charge`
* A `Customer` object will have an ID that you can store and re-bill at a later date

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