Installing and configuring Laravel Cashier
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Now that we have a Stripe account with a product and a pricing plan created, -
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we can go ahead and start integrating it into our application. -
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The first step is to install Cashier. -
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Cashier is just a package, so we can install it using the Composer dependency -
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manager. -
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Open up a command prompt and run sail composer require laraval/cashier -
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This will install the Cashier package and also add a number of migrations that -
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need running, so let's migrate our database. -
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This will add additional columns to our "users" table, as well as create tables -
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to hold subscription-related data. -
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Next, we need to add the Billable trait to our User model. -
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This will add functionality to our User model for working with subscriptions -
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for a particular customer instance. -
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Open up your User model, add "Billable" to the list of traits being used. -
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Next, we need to add our Stripe API keys. We need our publishable key and our -
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secret key from Stripe. -
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To find these, go back to your Stripe dashboard, click "Developer" in the top -
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right, click the "API keys" tab, -
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Ensure that we are viewing test data, and we need to copy these. -
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First, copy the publishable key, open up your .env file, and at the bottom, -
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create a new "STRIPE_KEY" secret, -
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and paste the value. We need to reveal the secret key, copy its value, -
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and paste that into a "STRIPE_SECRET" environment variable. -
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To ensure the correct currency is used, we'll also need to set a couple of -
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extra Cashier-specific environment variables. -
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As I created the product and pricing as Pounds in my account, I'll need to set a -
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"CASHIER_CURRENCY" environment variable and set its value to "gbp". -
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So let's copy this, add it to our environment file, and change the value to "gbp". -
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We can also copy this, and we can also set locale value to British English. -
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A good idea when adding entries to your .env file is to also copy them to an .env.example file. -
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So let's copy the Stripe and Cashier keys we've just created. -
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Copy them, open our .env.example file, paste them at the bottom, and then remove -
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their values. -
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As this example file will be committed to our Git repository, so we don't want -
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any live values in it. -
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However, by adding these keys, a developer cloning the project or setting -
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up on a new machine -
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and see exactly what environment variables the application requires to function. -
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Now that we've set up Stripe and installed and configured Cashier, we can move -
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on to create subscriptions and charge customers for access.