Every transaction in Stripe is associated with a customer. Since we want our user to be able to see their transaction history in Stripe, we need to keep a track of their customer ID in our profile table.
In this video, we create a new Stripe account and configure our Next.js application to use its publishable and secret API keys. Additionally, we discuss by adding NEXTPUBLIC to our environment variable names, it exposes them to the client - running in the user's browser. This is entirely safe for our publishable key - which can be public - but not our secret key - which should always be kept private.
To create a Stripe customer, we need to use our private API key, meaninh this logic will need to be executed on the server. Next.js makes this simple with API routes - special serverless functions that will be created for any .js files in the pages/api directory.
We create a new API route to handle adding a stripe customer and updating the user's profile with their customer ID.
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