How to Use Stripe Webhooks for Checking Subscription Auto-Renewal in Laravel

Laravel is the most common and widely popular open-source PHP framework used for building applications and websites. Along with having Laravel as your web development framework, it helps to have a webhook for additional features

A webhook is an HTTP endpoint that receives events from Stripe. Webhooks allow you to be notified about payment events that happen in the real world outside of your payment flow. 

Stripe webhooks are a powerful way to keep your Laravel application up-to-date with changes in your Stripe account. When a Stripe event occurs, such as a payment being created or a customer being updated, Stripe will send a webhook notification to your application. Your application can then listen for these notifications and take appropriate action, such as updating your database or sending an email notification to the customer.

Here we will discuss how to use Stripe webhooks for checking subscription auto-renewal. 

Stripe sends notifications to your app using webhooks. Webhooks are especially important for subscriptions, where most activity occurs asynchronously.

Here are some of the benefits of integrating Stripe webhooks to Laravel:

• Real-time updates: You can keep your Laravel application up-to-date with changes in your Stripe account in real time. This means that you can always be sure that your data is accurate and up-to-date.
• Reduced workload: You can automate many tasks by responding to Stripe events. This will reduce the amount of manual work that you need to do.
• Improved customer experience: You can provide a better customer experience by sending timely notifications to customers about changes to their accounts.

Following are the steps to use Stripe Webhooks

Stripe can notify your application of events using webhooks. This package can help you handle those webhooks. Out of the box it will verify the Stripe signature of all incoming requests. All valid calls will be logged to the database. You can easily define jobs or events that should be dispatched when specific events hit your app.

Step 1: Install the package

You can install the package via composer:

composer require spatie/laravel-stripe-webhooks

Step 2: Publish the config files

You must publish the config file with:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Spatie\StripeWebhooks\StripeWebhooksServiceProvider"

Step 3: Publish your migrations

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Spatie\WebhookClient\WebhookClientServiceProvider" --tag="webhook-client-migrations"

Step 4: Run the migration

php artisan migrate

Step 5: Configure your webhook in Stripe Dashboard

The first step is to register a webhook endpoint with Stripe. This is the URL that Stripe will send webhook notifications to. You can register a webhook endpoint in the Stripe Dashboard.

Method 1: Check with actual URL

Step 5.2: check with Stripe CLI

Step 6: Configure below given values in your .env file

 STRIPE_KEY=“”

 STRIPE_SECRET=“”

 STRIPE_WEBHOOK_SECRET=“”

Step 7: Configure your webhook URL in to routes.

Route::stripeWebhooks('webhook-route-configured-at-the-stripe-dashboard');

Step 8: Disable the csrf token for url which is you configured

Stripe has no way of getting a csrf-token, you must add that route to the except array of the VerifyCsrfToken middleware:

protected $except = [
	'webhook-route-configured-at-the-stripe-dashboard',
];

Step 9: Handle the requests with Jobs

<?php
namespace App\Jobs\StripeWebhooks;
use Illuminate\Bus\Queueable;
use Illuminate\Queue\SerializesModels;
use Illuminate\Queue\InteractsWithQueue;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldQueue;
use Spatie\WebhookClient\Models\WebhookCall;
class HandleChargeableSource implements ShouldQueue
{
	use InteractsWithQueue, Queueable, SerializesModels;
	/** @var \Spatie\WebhookClient\Models\WebhookCall */
	public $webhookCall;
	public function __construct(WebhookCall $webhookCall)
	{
    	$this->webhookCall = $webhookCall;
	}
	public function handle()
	{
    	// do your work here
    	// you can access the payload of the webhook call with `$this->webhookCall->payload`
	}
}

Step 10: Register you job in stripe webhook config file

// config/stripe-webhooks.php

'jobs' => [
	'source_chargeable' => \App\Jobs\StripeWebhooks\HandleChargeableSource::class,
],

After having created your job you must register it at the jobs array in the stripe-webhooks.php config file. The key should be the name of the stripe event type where but with the . replaced by _.

Let’s check how to run this on your local machine

You can check this also in your local system. Please follow the instructions in point 5.2.

stripe listen –forward-to localhost:4242/webhook.php

Here use your local URL instead of above like:

stripe listen –forward-to http://abc.local/stripe-webhook

Here ‘stripe-webhook’ is the configured url in routes for the stripe events.