Add additional headers on request

[dostaglou]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Problem being solved: for an internal compliance requirement, I am required to provide a custom hmac header to outbound requests including ones handled by the Stripe gem.

Describe the solution you'd like

A hook we can integrate with during initialization of Stripe that allows our system to alter the request directly. In this case, add additional headers after inspecting the body content and URI.

Describe alternatives you've considered

If a hook for adding headers to the request is unavailable, simply moving the request building to its own method would enable a more narrow monkey patch and this part of the logic is far less likely to see changes in future updates thus providing some extra stability.

Currently we are looking to monkey patch Stripe::ConnectionManager#execute_request. In particular, right before Net::HTTPGenericRequest.new is executed, we add our own header content.

Additional context

If there exists a solution to this problem already, I would also greatly appreciate being pointed to it.

[helenye-stripe]

Hi! If you're just looking to add an additional header, you can pass one through using request options. For example:

client = Stripe::StripeClient.new(API_KEY)
c = client.v1.customers.retrieve("cus_Q11bcaSRwSQRAM", {stripe_account: acct, "Test-Header": "foo", "Header2": "bar"})

# OR for the legacy pattern

c = Stripe::Customer.retrieve("cus_Q11bcaSRwSQRAM", {stripe_account: acct, "Test-Header": "foo", "Header2": "bar"})

Would that work to solve your problem?

[dostaglou]

Thank you kindly for the pointer, @helenye-stripe! Alas that would not be enough on its own. The header I need to insert needs to be a hash of details for the request so it needs to be aware of the full JSON body for the request.

[helenye-stripe]

Gotcha! We currently don't have plans to implement something like this, but I can discuss with my team. One other option we have considered but decided against without enough interest is allowing for custom HTTP clients, which I think would make this possible.

[dostaglou]

Gotcha! We currently don't have plans to implement something like this, but I can discuss with my team. One other option we have considered but decided against without enough interest is allowing for custom HTTP clients, which I think would make this possible.

Indeed. If this kind of approach allows for for the client to use their own HTTP client, I'd imagine the implementation would allow introspection and edit on the request before sending. I believe that would indeed solve the core issue.

Alternatively if the Net::HTTPGenericRequest.new was broken into its own method execution, that would make monkey patches on this part a bit cleaner as well.

All that said, I thank you for looking at this proposal!

[xavdid-stripe]

@dostaglou We chatted about this as a team today and came to the conclusion that it's not something we're going to work on right now. That said, if you're willing to send a PR to add the hook function you need (& associated tests) we'd be happy to work with you to get it merged!

[dostaglou]

Understood, @xavdid-stripe . Thank you for looking into it. While unfortunate it is a reasonable response.

As for a PR to patch in the desired functionality, I will give that a look. If I find an easy way to do so, I will try.

Given this effectively concludes the issue, we can probably close this now.

Thanks for the response!

[xavdid-stripe]

We're fine to leave it open in case anyone else has additional color to add / also wants this feature to happen. But otherwise yeah, just let us know!