Start the Course Project App

I totally get it. The words "payment system integration" sound super intimidating, but trust me, by the end of this course, you'll be saying:

With LemonSqueezy, it's easy peasy!

Let's check out our project! We downloaded the course code in the previous chapter, but if you haven’t yet, you can download it from this page now. Unzip it, go to the start/ directory, and don’t forget to check the README.md file for all the setup instructions. I’ve already completed these steps, so I'll go ahead and start the web server with

symfony serve -d

and click on this URL.

Welcome to "Squeeze the Day" - our digital lemonade stand! We have some products here, we can add them to our cart, and we can even specify the quantity. The actual cart page, where we can check out, is where we'll need LemonSqueezy's integration.

We also provide weekly lemonade delivery for subscribers! How convenient! We'll talk about subscriptions in the next course. We can also register, log in, and find some basic account info. Let's do that!

In AppFixtures.php, you'll find some default user credentials. Copy this email, go back to the login page, and paste that into the email field. The password is "lemonpass". Hit "Sign In"... and check out the "Account" page. Pretty basic stuff at the moment.

Install HTTP Client

Okay, now we can work on our API. For help getting started, let's take a look at the docs. Go to lemonsqueezy.com... click on "Resources", "Developer Docs", and "Guides". Then find a chapter called "Getting Started with the API". It looks like we need to create an API key (we'll do that later), and then make all of our API requests using the specific domain and headers mentioned here. LemonSqueezy also requires some authentication, so we'll also need to pass an authorization token. To send API requests from our Symfony application, we can leverage the Symfony HttpClient component, which is perfect for executing HTTP requests.

To do that, at your terminal, run:

composer require symfony/http-client

Looks like it was already installed as an indirect dependency, so Composer just added it to composer.json as direct dependency. Sweet. Now we need to configure it! In config/packages/, create a new file called http_client.yaml.

Create a Scoped HTTP Client

In our new file, create a scoped client that will help us send requests to LemonSqueezy's API - framework:, http_client:, scoped_clients: - and call it lemon_squeezy.client. Then, for base_uri:, over in the docs under "Making requests", copy this URL - 'https://api.lemonsqueezy.com/v1/' - and paste it here. Next, under headers:, set Accept: to 'application/vnd.api+json', and do the same for Content-Type:.

For authorization, we need to add a Bearer token, but first, let's set up the API key, so we can make API requests. Open the LemonSqueezy dashboard and go to "Settings", "API", and "Add API key". Let's call it "API", click "Create API key", and copy the key we generated. This is top secret, so... pretend you never saw this. I'll generate a new, secret-er one later.

Since we want to keep this a secret, we don't want to save this in our .env file with everything else, because that's committed to the repository. To keep this safe and secure, create a new .env.local file and save it there instead. This file isn't committed to the repository, so it will be safe here. Write LEMON_SQUEEZY_API_KEY= and paste our API key. Now, we can copy this line, excluding the key, and in .env... down here... paste. This really just lets us know that we need this environment variable for our app to work. On production, you can set this as a real environment variable with your cloud hosting. Or, to make this even more secure, take a look at Symfony's secrets management system. You can find more information about that in the docs on symfony.com.

Finally, back in http_client.yaml, under base_uri, add auth_bearer: '%env(LEMON_SQUEEZY_API_KEY)%'. Done!

Now we’re ready to send an HTTP request to LemonSqueezy's API! Let's do that next.