How to change Stripe's API version for testing, etc

Question

We're managing an old Rails app that uses Stripe but our Stripe version 26 months behind the current API. We're looking to upgrade to the current Stripe API but because many changes will affect our system, we'd really like a way to test out the changes before we change the live API that our live site is using.

So I have two questions:

1) When working with the API we rely heavily on the distinction between Live and Test modes. Is there any way to upgrade the Test mode API only (without upgrading Live) so we can identify and correct for any breakage without actually breaking the user experience?

2) Is it possible to upgrade the API one version at a time, rather than all-at-once, to make the transition more manageable for us?

Answer 1

It's extremely poorly documented, but it turns out you can change the Stripe API version to any version you want on a per-request basis by setting Stripe.api_version = 'YYYY-MM-DD' before sending a request using the Ruby bindings (https://stripe.com/docs/api/ruby#versioning), or by sending a Stripe-Version HTTP header.

So we'll plan to configure our specs to use the latest API version for all requests, and test for breakage that way.

Answer 2

Below is one-way to override the Stripe version at a fine-grained level within your code.

This works by overriding the Stripe.api_version accessor method to look for a version in a thread local variable, or if it doesn't find one, falls back to the original behaviour. Stripe.api_version is used as the value of the Stripe-Version HTTP header in lib/stripe.rb.

Note this is for stripe gem version 1.58.0 and has not been tested with other versions:

First, create the file config/initializers/stripe_api_version_overrider.rb with contents:

module StripeAPIVersionOverrider
  def api_version
    Thread.current[:__stripe_api_version_override] || super
  end

  def with_api_version(version, &block)
    original_version = api_version
    Thread.current[:__stripe_api_version_override] = version
    block.call
  ensure
    Thread.current[:__stripe_api_version_override] = original_version
  end
end

Stripe.singleton_class.prepend(StripeAPIVersionOverrider)

Next, in your code where you want to use a different version of the Stripe API, wrap it in a block passed to Stripe.with_api_version:

Stripe.with_api_version "2016-07-06" do
  # API versions prior to 2016-07-06 did not support
  # retrieving canceled subscriptions.
  Stripe::Subscription.retrieve(subscription_id)
end

Run bin/spring stop to ensure these changes will be loaded into your development environment.