Bring Your Own Solution

Learn how to use Stigg as your Pricing & Packaging CMS

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Overview

The common way to integrate with Stigg is by using Stigg SDKs or API, but it's also possible to use Stigg's cloud services and UI to manage your product catalog and subscriptions, but still own a replica of the data, and build a custom integration on top of that. We like to call that "Bring Your Own Solution" (or BYOS) type of integration.

If any of the following is true, you might consider the BYOS approach:

  1. You already have an entitlement management solution that provisions customers with access to your product, and switching over is too much effort.
  2. You prefer not to depend on the availability of Stigg cloud services or SDKs for enforcing access to features.

As an alternative to other integration methods, it's possible to keep using your existing solution (or build one) by sourcing its data from Stigg to keep it in sync.

In this tutorial, we'll run a BYOS application that consumes events from Stigg, over a webhook, stores their data in relational DB, and exposes it over a GraphQL API.

Example

We'll implement a Node.js Express app and use Postgraphile to generate a GraphQL API based on a relational database schema, for which will use PostgreSQL.

📘

The full source code is available here.

1. Preparing the DB and the data model

Let's start by preparing the init script that will define the database schema:

CREATE TABLE public.customers
(
    created_at   TIMESTAMP             DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
    updated_at   TIMESTAMP             DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
    customer_id  VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL UNIQUE PRIMARY KEY,
    name         TEXT,
    email        TEXT,
    billing_id   VARCHAR(255),
    entitlements JSON         NOT NULL DEFAULT '[]'::JSON
);

COMMENT
ON TABLE public.customers IS 'Customer records.';

comment on column public.customers.entitlements is E'@overrideType Entitlement[]';

CREATE TABLE public.subscriptions
(
    created_at        TIMESTAMP DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
    updated_at        TIMESTAMP DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
    subscription_id   VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL UNIQUE PRIMARY KEY,
    customer_id       VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL REFERENCES public.customers (customer_id),
    status            VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
    plan_id           VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
    plan_name         TEXT         NOT NULL,
    billing_id        VARCHAR(255),
    start_date        TIMESTAMP    NOT NULL,
    end_date          TIMESTAMP,
    cancellation_date TIMESTAMP,
    trial_end_date    TIMESTAMP
);

COMMENT
ON TABLE public.subscriptions IS 'Subscription records.';

2. Creating the endpoint

We will populate the above tables with data from Stigg, so for that, we'll add an endpoint to handle the incoming webhooks:


// Endpoint to handle incoming webhooks from Stigg
app.post('/webhook', async (req, res) => {
  // Naive verification of the webhook origin, HMAC signatures will be added later
  if (req.header('stigg-webhooks-secret') !== process.env.STIGG_WEBHOOK_SECRET) {
    res.status(401).send('Unauthorized');
    return;
  }

  try {
    // Process the event here ...
    await processEvent(req.body);
    res.status(200).json({ success: true });
  } catch (err) {
    res.status(500).json({ success: false });
  }
});

3. Subscribing to events

Add the webhook in Stigg, and point it to /webhook endpoint we've just added.
Subscribe to the following events:

  • customer.created
  • customer.updated
  • customer.deleted
  • entitlements.updated
  • measurement.reported
  • subscription.created
  • subscription.updated
  • subscription.canceled
  • subscription.expired
  • subscription.trial_expired

4. Writing the event processor

We'll need an event processor to handle the arriving events, extract the relevant state and update our local app's database:

export async function processEvent(event: WebhookEvent) {
  console.log(`Processing event: ${event.messageId}`, event);
  try {
    await applyEvent(event);
  } catch (err) {
    console.error(`Failed to process event: ${event.messageId}`, err);
    throw err;
  }
  console.log(`Event processed: ${event.messageId}`);
}

async function applyEvent(event: WebhookEvent) {
  switch (event.type) {
    case 'customer.created':
      return onCustomerCreated(event);
    case 'customer.updated':
      return onCustomerUpdated(event);
    case 'customer.deleted':
      return onCustomerDeleted(event);
    case 'entitlements.updated':
      return onEntitlementsUpdated(event);
    case 'measurement.reported':
      return onMeasurementReported(event);
    case 'subscription.created':
      return onSubscriptionCreated(event);
    case 'subscription.updated':
    case 'subscription.canceled':
    case 'subscription.expired':
    case 'subscription.trial_expired':
      return onSubscriptionUpdated(event);
  }
}

async function onCustomerCreated(event: CustomerEvent) {
  await DB.customers.insert({
    created_at: new Date(event.timestamp),
    customer_id: event.id,
    ...mapCustomerState(event),
  });
}

async function onCustomerUpdated(event: CustomerEvent) {
  await DB.customers.where({ customer_id: event.id }).update({
    updated_at: new Date(event.timestamp),
    ...mapCustomerState(event),
  });
}

async function onCustomerDeleted(event: CustomerEvent) {
  await DB.customers.where({ customer_id: event.id }).delete();
}

// ... rest of the logic

The full file is available here.

4. GraphQL API

To expose the data over an API, we'll add the postgraphile middleware to our express app:


// Exposing the GraphQL API generated from the database public schema, accessible at /graphql
app.use(
  postgraphile(process.env.DATABASE_URL, 'public', {
    subscriptions: true,
    watchPg: true,
    dynamicJson: true,
    setofFunctionsContainNulls: false,
    ignoreRBAC: false,
    showErrorStack: 'json',
    extendedErrors: ['hint', 'detail', 'errcode'],
    appendPlugins: [require('@graphile-contrib/pg-simplify-inflector')],
    skipPlugins: [require('graphile-build').NodePlugin],
    graphiql: true,
    enhanceGraphiql: true,
    enableQueryBatching: true,
    legacyRelations: 'omit',
    disableQueryLog: true,
  }),
);

5. Querying the data

Now we can access the generated GraphQL API, to make our life easier we'll use the GraphiQL interactive UI (at /graphiql) and run queries like so:

6. Entitlement checks

Let's add an endpoint that we can use to perform a check if a customer can access a feature or not, so our other services can use it:


app.post('/check-access', async (req, res) => {
  const { customerId, featureId, requestedUsage } = req.body;
  if (!customerId || !featureId) {
    res.status(400).send('customerId and featureId are required');
    return;
  }

  const decision = await checkAccess(customerId, featureId, requestedUsage);

  if (decision.hasAccess) {
    res.status(200).json(decision);
  } else {
    res.status(403).json(decision);
  }
});

The logic of the checkAccessfunction can be found here.

Source code

For your convenience, we prepared a runnable example project that demonstrates this approach. You can find the source code of the example on GitHub👇

stiggio/stigg-byos-example
github.com

Updated 5 months ago