Does NestJS Work With Stripe?
NestJS and Stripe work seamlessly together, with NestJS providing the ideal server framework structure for building secure, scalable payment processing applications.
Quick Facts
How NestJS Works With Stripe
NestJS integrates excellently with Stripe through the official stripe-node library, which provides a clean JavaScript/TypeScript interface to Stripe's REST API. NestJS's modular architecture is particularly well-suited for payment processing—you can create a dedicated StripeModule that encapsulates all payment logic, handles webhook subscriptions, manages API keys securely via environment variables, and provides injectable services throughout your application. The framework's built-in dependency injection system makes it trivial to inject a Stripe service into controllers or other services, enabling clean separation of concerns.
Developers typically create a StripeService wrapper around the Stripe client that handles common operations like creating payment intents, managing customers, processing refunds, and validating webhook signatures. NestJS's middleware and guards work perfectly for authenticating webhook requests from Stripe—you can validate the Stripe signature header to ensure authenticity. The async nature of NestJS aligns perfectly with Stripe's async workflows; payment confirmations, webhook events, and asynchronous charge processing integrate naturally with NestJS's Observable-based architecture.
Architecturally, most teams create a dedicated payments module with services for different payment flows (one-time charges, subscriptions, invoicing), controllers that expose REST endpoints, and interceptors that handle responses uniformly. Error handling is straightforward—Stripe throws well-defined exceptions that NestJS filters can catch and transform into appropriate HTTP responses.
Best Use Cases
Quick Setup
npm install stripe// stripe.service.ts
import { Injectable } from '@nestjs/common';
import Stripe from 'stripe';
@Injectable()
export class StripeService {
private stripe: Stripe;
constructor() {
this.stripe = new Stripe(process.env.STRIPE_SECRET_KEY);
}
async createPaymentIntent(amount: number, currency: string) {
return this.stripe.paymentIntents.create({
amount: Math.round(amount * 100),
currency,
automatic_payment_methods: { enabled: true },
});
}
async constructWebhookEvent(body: Buffer, sig: string) {
return this.stripe.webhooks.constructEvent(
body,
sig,
process.env.STRIPE_WEBHOOK_SECRET,
);
}
}
// payments.controller.ts
@Post('create-intent')
async createIntent(@Body() body: { amount: number }) {
return this.stripeService.createPaymentIntent(body.amount, 'usd');
}Known Issues & Gotchas
Webhook signature verification must validate X-Stripe-Signature header with your signing secret, not your API key
Fix: Use Stripe's constructEvent() method with the raw request body and signing secret; ensure you're not parsing JSON before verification
Stripe API calls are async and can timeout or fail; unhandled promise rejections will crash the process without proper error handling
Fix: Wrap all Stripe calls in try-catch blocks or use NestJS exception filters; implement exponential backoff retry logic for idempotent operations
Test mode and live mode API keys are different; accidentally using live key in development causes real charges
Fix: Use separate environment files (.env.test, .env.production) and validate which mode is active at startup; use Stripe's test card numbers in development
Webhook events can be delivered multiple times; idempotency is crucial to avoid duplicate processing
Fix: Store processed event IDs in your database and check before processing; or use idempotency keys for Stripe API requests
Alternatives
- •Express.js + Stripe (more low-level control, less structure)
- •Next.js + Stripe (great for full-stack, but less suitable for backend-only payment processing)
- •FastAPI + Stripe (Python alternative for async payment processing)
Resources
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