If you’ve used Stripe’s integration in your application before, you would have come across the need for reconciliation with Stripe in order to update the status of your customers’ accounts. Thankfully, Stripe makes that simple by providing a solution — Webhooks.

After first testing your Stripe webhook in the local environment, you might’ve been successful in listening to the events and responding correctly. However, upon deploying to your production server, things could potentially start to go awry if you don’t wire your API logic in an efficient and smooth manner.

Here are some tips that helped me to resolve the elusive 500 (Internal Server Error) and 503 (Service Unavailable).

1. (Least Helpful) Check that your backend server is actually running

Sometimes we leave our builds to deploy and take it for granted that they have been deployed correctly to the server. Take a quick glance at your server, and check whether you’re using the correct image (If you’re using Docker) and take a look through to see if your server is actually running, sometimes we get caught up in our work that we might’ve missed it out!

2. Ensure you’re using the correct secret and publishable keys

One of the causes to the 5xx errors I faced was actually an issue with my secret and publishable key. Ensure that you are retrieving your secret key from your webhook posted on Stripe’s developer dashboard:

It should look something like the above if you’re on the right page.

To get your publishable key, you can go to the “API Keys” section within the developer’s dashboard and you should see the section there for it.

Before deploying, check that your image or build contains the correct environment’s key; be sure not to mix up the test mode keys and your production keys when deploying, as it could lead to weird and tough-to-debug errors like the 5xx above. In my experience, this was the cause to my 5xx errors, so do double check your .env files!

3. Acknowledge Stripe’s call to your webhook quickly

Remember to add a response.send() [If you’re using Express/Node]/simply provide an acknowledgment to Stripe to tell it that you have received it’s request and you’re processing it.

For the rest of your business logic/database updating, abstract your logic into a separate function and call it asynchronously. If Stripe doesn’t hear back from your API within a few seconds it could automatically terminate the request, so be sure to let Stripe know everything is ok!

4. Check your server logs

If you’re using Google Cloud Run / GCP, you can access your logs via the service that’s running, and then go to “Log Explorer” / “Logs”.

Sometimes just knowing the status code thrown from your API in Stripe’s dashboard isn’t enough, check and see if your server is spitting out any errors with authentication/how you handle the request and response chain to spot any clues to debugging your error.

The above steps helped me in troubleshooting the headache inducing error 5xx, and it can be troubling when the webhook works in your local environment but not on your production server! So do check through your codes thoroughly and see if you are abiding by the best practices for creating webhooks as instructed by Stripe.

As always, if you are still facing the same error after trying the above, feel free to post in the comments and I’ll try my best to help out! Have a great day!