Configuring Stripe in the Developer Portal

You can offer free use of your Product Plans to your API consumers, or you can offer Products with paid Plans. To enable API consumers to subscribe to Products with paid Plans, you must first configure the Stripe payment method in your Developer Portal.

Before you begin

You must have administrator access to the Developer Portal to complete this task.

To use Stripe as your credit card processing vendor, you must have port 443 open to HTTPS communication between the Stripe API and your Developer Portal management and the Management cluster servers. See Firewall requirements on Kubernetes for more information about this requirement.

The billing microservice must be enabled on your management system by your system administrator. See Configuring monetization on Kubernetes for more information.

Billing integration support must be configured in the API Manager. For more information, see Monetizing your Products.

About this task

API Connect includes a subscription billing feature that allows API providers to define pricing Plans in their API Products, and monetize their API offerings. If a Product contains a pricing Plan, API consumers must enter their payment information into the Developer Portal before they can subscribe to that Plan.

API Connect supports integration with Stripe Subscription Billing, an independent cloud service that manages monetized product Plans, customers, their payment information, and their subscription history, in order to generate monthly invoices and charge customers automatically. With this integration, Stripe serves as both the subscription billing system and the payment processing system.

Support is provided for Stripe in the Developer Portal, but before API consumers can enter their payment information, you need to configure the Stripe billing support in every Developer Portal where you will offer paid Plans. After this support is configured, API consumers can provide their payment information, and then subscribe to the paid Plans. Complete the following instructions to enable the APIC Monetization Stripe Integration module, and then configure your Stripe API credentials.

Procedure

  1. If the administrator dashboard is not displayed, click Manage to display it.
  2. In the administrator dashboard, click Extend.
    The List tab for the Extend page opens, and the list of installed modules is displayed. The list shows all the modules that are installed. The enabled modules are displayed with a selected checkbox. The disabled modules are displayed without a selected checkbox.
  3. Enter stripe into the search filter.
    The ibm_stripe_payment_method module called APIC Monetization Stripe Integration is displayed in the list of contents.
  4. Select APIC Monetization Stripe Integration and click Enable.
    The default settings for the ibm_stripe_payment_method module are now enabled.
  5. In the administrator dashboard, click Configuration > System > IBM API Developer Portal Billing.
    The IBM API Developer Portal Billing Settings page is displayed.
  6. Change the drop-down option to be the newly enabled APIC Monetization Stripe Integration (ibm_stripe_payment_method) as the module to use to create payment methods for the Stripe billing provider. Click Save configuration.
  7. In the administrator dashboard, click Configuration > System > IBM APIC Stripe Integration, and enter your Stripe API credentials. These credentials must match the Stripe API credentials for the billing integration resource that is attached to the Catalog for this Developer Portal.
    Refer to your Stripe dashboard to get your publishable key and secret key; see https://dashboard.stripe.com/apikeys.
    Note: Each Stripe account comes with two sets of API keys, one for testing, and one for production. Each set of API keys has a distinct namespace for Stripe objects. Test API keys cannot see objects created by production API keys, and vice versa. You cannot switch the API keys of one of your billing integrations with the keys from another account, or swap your test and production keys over, as that would prevent API Connect from resolving the Stripe objects that were created by using the old keys. If you want to use your Stripe test keys, you must create a separate Catalog for testing, and not add your Stripe test keys to production Catalogs.
  8. Click Save integration.

Results

You successfully configured the Stripe payment method in the Developer Portal. API consumers can now add a payment method to their consumer organization, so that they can subscribe to Products with paid Plans.

What to do next

After both the Catalog and the Developer Portal are configured, you can create Products with pricing Plans. See Defining a Product with billing integration for more information.