Playing with external APIs, like Stripe, from your Rails instance

It’s always been a bit of a mystery what the best way to play with integration of my Rails app with external APIs (like Stripe) might be. My brother put an end to that today by showing me how dead simple it is from the Rails console.

So if you’re trying to manually play with an external API, you can load up your console and fire away.

$bundle exec rails console
Loading backup environment (Rails 4.2.11.1)
irb(main):001:0> 

Then look at your API reference (like here) and run with it.

Here’s an example of querying for a Stripe coupon.

irb(main):001:0> Stripe.api_key
=> "some_api_key"

irb(main):001:0> Stripe::Coupon.list({limit: 1})
=> #<Stripe::ListObject:0x3fcc22040d5c> JSON: {
  "object": "list",
  "data": [
    {"id":"some_id","object":"coupon","amount_off":1000,"created":1585272944,"currency":"usd","duration":"once","duration_in_months":null,"livemode":false,"max_redemptions":1,"name":"$10 Coupon","percent_off":null,"redeem_by":1593221744,"times_redeemed":0,"valid":true}
  ],
  "has_more": true,
  "url": "/v1/coupons"
}
irb(main):003:0>