Create A Subscription Service with Stripe in NodeJS & Express

Here’s how to create a backend service for recurring charges for your customers with Stripe.

Photo by Ales Nesetril on Unsplash

With subscriptions, customers can make recurring payments for access to a product. Subscriptions are not so different from one-time purchases — only that they are recurring and requires you to hold onto your customers’ information so you can charge them automatically.

This tutorial will guide you to setup a backend application in NodeJS and Express to setup a subscription service.

Navigate to your project folder and create a file named index.js. Once you’re done, install Express, HTTP, Body-Parser, and Stripe.

npm i express
npm i http
npm i body-parser
npm i stripe

We’ll next code for our server to use routes and body parser to handle data.

const express = require("express");
const app = express();
const routes = require('./stripe-module/route');
const bodyParser = require('body-parser')
const http = require('http');
app.use(cors());
app.use(bodyParser.json())
app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: true }));
const port = 8001;
app.set('port', port);
app.use(routes);
const server = http.createServer(app);
server.listen(port, () => {
console.log(`Express server listening on port ${port}`);
});

To keep things organized, let’s create a folder to hold the service , controller, and route javascript files. Name it stripe-module.

Create a file named service.js. Inside we’ll write a function that sends a request to Stripe. The required parameters for this to work is a customer’s ID and an array of price items the customer is subscribing for.

Note: Remember to add your stripe key for this work!

const stripe = require('stripe')('sk_test_key_here');
const service = {};
service.createSubscription = (customerId, items) => {
       return stripe.subscriptions.create({
              customer: customerId,
              items: items
       });
}
module.exports = service;

We’ll next create a controller that acquires data from the request and sends it over to the service. Create a file named controller.js and write the following code.

const service = require('./service');
const controller = {};
controller.createSubscription = async(req, res) => {
    const { customerId, items } = req.body;
    try {
      const subscription = 
              await service.createSubscription(customerId, items);
      res.json({ response: subscription });
    } catch (error) {
      console.error(error);
      return res.status(400).json({ error: error.message });
    }
};
module.exports = controller;

Lastly, let’s setup the route that trigger the subscription request. Create a file named router.js and write the following code in it.

const router = require('express').Router();
const controller = require('./controller');
const subscriptionMiddleware = [
      controller.createSubscription
];
router.post('/subscribe', subscriptionMiddleware)
module.exports = router;

That’s it! Run the app with npm run start or node index.js and send a request using Postman.

Remember to add the customerId and items — as an array — to the body of this post request. Below is an example of how I did that using JSON.

Thanks for reading & Happy Coding! 🚀

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