I've been working with Stripe and realized that I made a lot of configuration changes in my Sandbox dashboard. When the time comes to switch to production, I'm worried I'll forget to carry everything over to the live account. How do you all handle this situation? I asked ChatGPT, and it suggested that I should be doing everything via the Stripe API to ensure consistency between sandbox and production. This includes tasks like creating products and managing payment methods. Is this a common approach for you?
5 Answers
I hit the same snag when I moved to live mode. Everything was fine in the sandbox, but I missed some details in production. Now, I use the dashboard for quick prototyping but rely on a setup script/API for the actual configuration. This way, I can just swap keys between environments without worrying about missing something.
The dashboard is super handy when you’re still exploring and things are changing, but once you're aiming for consistency and production readiness, the API is really the way to go.
We’ve set up a change log for Stripe configurations to manage deployment steps. We do some things manually right now, but having a record helps a lot.
By the way, I'm working on an open-source payments solution that’s simpler than Stripe, although we use Stripe under the hood. It’s set up to be really friendly for developers. If you’re interested, I can get you into our support chat for more details!
It’s smart to treat Stripe config like infrastructure. Creating products, prices, and webhooks through the API means your setup runs the same way for both test and live environments. For things that can’t be automated, like branding or emails, just keeping a checklist usually works well.
I'm curious about the "Payments Without Webhooks" part of your setup. What led you to go in that direction?