How to save Payment Methods on Stripe — NodeJS

Stripe is capable of storing payment methods for you. This is more secure than storing this kind of information on your own database.

Photo by CardMapr on Unsplash

This is a brief tutorial to help you save a payment method and link it to a registered customer.

Installing Stripe

We’ll start by creating a js file, name it index.js. Install Stripe by running:

npm i stripe

Instantiate Stripe

Inside index.js, we’ll instantiate Stripe with our test secret keys

const stripe = require('stripe')('sk_test_key_here');

Save A Payment Method

We’ll next code to send a request with the card details as an object.

const paymentMethod = await stripe.paymentMethods.create({
  type: 'card',
  card: {
    number: '4242424242424242',
    exp_month: 9,
    exp_year: 2022,
    cvc: '314',
  },
});
console.log(paymentMethod)

Test the app by running it:

node index.js

You should the see a response with an “ID” property. The value of this ID is a unique identifier for this payment method.

Please note that the card is saved on your Stripe account but it is not associated with any customer — we’ll need to attach it.

Attach A Saved Payment Method to a User

You might prefer to allow users to re-use their payment methods for future transactions. Here’s how to link a payment method to a customer.

For this function, you’ll need to provide a Payment Method ID and a Customer ID.

const paymentMethod = await stripe.paymentMethods.attach(
  paymentId,
  {customer: customerId}
);

You’ll need to re-write your code to pass these IDs as parameters. Here’s how I would do it:

attachPaymentMethod = (customerID, paymentMethodID) => {
      return stripe.paymentMethods.attach(
             customerID,
             {customer: paymentMethodID}
);

You can finally call this function right after the payment method is added.

attachPaymentMethod('customer-id-goes-here', 'pm-id-goes-here')

Thanks for reading & Happy Coding!

Payments on iOS with Stripe