Retrieve a Customer's Subscription ID from Stripe

Question

In Rails, I'm attempting to implement a controller action which will allow a customer to change the plan they are subscribed to. Per the Stripe documentation, this can be done as follows:

customer = Stripe::Customer.retrieve("CUSTOMER_ID")
subscription = customer.subscriptions.retrieve("SUBSCRIPTION_ID")
subscription.plan = "premium_monthly"
subscription.save

I have each customer's ID saved in the user table in my Database, but I'm stuck on how to retrieve a customer's subscription ID given their customer ID. Each customer in this project will only have one subscription, how could I go about pulling this given their customer ID?

Externalize

Answer 1

The relevant part of the Stripe API reference suggests that upon retrieving a customer you will have access to a subscriptions attribute containing a url at which you can access a list of subscriptions.

However, on creating a subscription, Stripe will return the subscription to you with the subscription id. I would suggest storing this in your database as an attribute on the customer model (if they will only have one subscription) or, and the method I use, is to have a Subscription model in my database which stores some of the frequently accessed data and avoids pinging the Stripe API too much.

Poplar

Thanks, I took a look at the API and found the URL you mentioned. I'm still very new to working with Stripe though (and APIs in general), and am not sure how to use that URL to get the subscription ID saved to a variable. – Externalize

They work just like Ruby objects. Bear in mind that the subscriptions attribute returns an array but calling customer.subscriptions.first.id will retrieve the id of the first subscription (and the only according to your question). – Poplar

"Changes since API version 2019-08-14 → 2020-08-27 The subscriptions property on Customers is no longer included by default. You can expand the list but for performance reasons we recommended against doing so unless needed." stripe.com/docs/api/expanding_objects – Singley

Answer 2

"retrieving a customer you will have access to a subscriptions"

Was the case with the API from 2019.

Changes since API version 2019-08-14 → 2020-08-27 The subscriptions property on Customers is no longer included by default. You can expand the list but for performance reasons we recommended against doing so unless needed.

See https://stripe.com/docs/api/expanding_objects

Example code (PHP):

$stripe = new \Stripe\StripeClient(YOURSTRIPE_SECRETKEY);
$stripe_customer = $stripe->customers->retrieve($payerid, [ 'expand' => ['subscriptions'] ]);
$stripe_status = $stripe_customer->subscriptions->data[0]->status;

I am still trying to figure out the "recommended way" and will hopefully report back.

Singley

Answer 3

You dont need to fetch the Customer object to retrieve Subscriptions. Just use the static Subscription.search API like this :

final SubscriptionSearchResult searchResult 
    = Subscription.search(SubscriptionSearchParams.builder()
                            .setQuery("customer:'PUT_CUSTOMER_ID_HERE'")
                            .build());
...

final List<Subscription> subscriptions = searchResult.getData();

Elison

Field customer is an unsupported search field for resource subscriptions. See stripe.com/docs/search#query-fields-for-subscriptions for a list of supported fields. – Atory