Creating your first Stripe Charge with Python + Flask in 5 minutes

Published: Jun 27, 2020

Last updated: Jun 27, 2020

In this short series, we are going to look at how to create a charge to Stripe in a number of their officially supported languages!

Today, we are going to look at how to do so with Python and Flask.

The expectations are that you have both Python 3 and pip3 installed and have your Stripe API keys setup and ready to go.

The following comes in part from my documentation website.

Getting Started

mkdir python-flask-stripe && cd python-flask-stripe
# pip or pip3 depending on env
pip3 install Flask
pip3 install stripe
pip3 install -U python-dotenv
touch .env server.py

Setting up .env

Fetch your keys from Stripe and replace the following in the file:

SK_TEST_KEY=sk... # replace sk...

Writing server.py

Set up the file to look like the following:

from flask import Flask
from flask import request
from dotenv import load_dotenv
import stripe
import os

# Load local .env file and assign key
load_dotenv()
stripe.api_key = os.environ.get("SK_TEST_KEY")

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route("/api/charge", methods = ['POST'])
def charge():
    try:
        content = request.get_json()
        # Print what JSON comes in for the sake of checking
        print(content)

        resp = stripe.Charge.create(
            amount=content['amount'],
            currency="usd",
            source="tok_visa",
            receipt_email=content['receiptEmail'],
        )
        print("Success: %r" % (resp))
        return "Successfully charged", 201
    except Exception as e:
        print(e)
        return "Charge failed", 500

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run()

The above:

Fetches and sets OS env from .env file.
Sets the Stripe API key.
Sets a route /api/charge that only takes the POST method and creates a charge based on the amount we pass.

Running the server

python3 server.py will start the server on port 5000.

Running http POST http://localhost:5000/api/charge amount:=1700 receiptEmail=hello_flask@example.com (using HTTPie) will come back with success. Check your Stripe dashboard and you will see a charge made for AUD\$17.00! Hooray!

I chose to use HTTPie because I feel it is a fun tool that more should know about! Alternative, you could do the above using curl as well (or anything that can make a POST request for a matter of fact).

curl --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --request POST \
  --data '{"amount":1700,"receiptEmail":"hello_flask@example.com"}' \
  http://localhost:5000/api/charge