Week 009 — Webhooks Done, Then Nothing

The webhook processed its first real payment event. Then Thanksgiving happened, and then illness.

Week of November 25, 2024

Progress

Got the webhook to do useful work: on a successful payment event, it extracts the subscription data from the Stripe payload and updates srchParty's internal transaction records. The loop is closed — a user can subscribe, Stripe handles the payment, and the application is notified and responds.

The subscriptions table was created this week. The open question is whether to use Stripe's Entitlements feature to manage what users have access to — essentially outsourcing the "what is this person allowed to do?" question to Stripe's API — or to manage it internally. The answer is still internal: the dependency it would create isn't worth it. The application needs to own its own access control.

Also updated the runbook after the dev machine rebooted unexpectedly. Getting Docker, Apache, and the Stripe CLI listener back up had enough steps that they needed to be written down properly.

Next Week

Two weeks away from the project, as it turned out. Thanksgiving, and then sick. Sometimes the schedule decides for you.