Supercharge Your Stack: A Guide to Integrating Stripe and Slack with Actions.do

In modern software development, our applications are rarely monolithic. We rely on a constellation of best-in-class services: Stripe for payments, Twilio for communication, a CRM for customer data, and Slack for internal collaboration. The challenge isn't using these services; it's connecting them. This connecting fabric, often called "glue code," can quickly become a tangled, brittle mess of webhooks, serverless functions, and cron jobs that are difficult to manage, monitor, and scale.

What if you could transform that fragile glue code into a robust, observable, and reusable set of building blocks?

Enter Actions.do. We believe in Actions as Code, Results as Software. By encapsulating every business task—from sending a notification to processing a payment—into a simple API call, you can build powerful, agentic workflows that are as solid as your core application logic.

In this guide, we'll walk through a classic business automation task: posting a real-time notification to a Slack channel for every new high-value subscription processed by Stripe. We'll show you how to leave messy scripts behind and build a resilient workflow with Actions.do.

The Old Way: The Perils of Glue Code

Let's first look at the traditional approach. You'd likely set up a webhook in your Stripe account that points to a serverless function (e.g., AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Function).

This function would:

1. Receive the webhook payload from Stripe.
2. Contain some logic to parse the data.
3. Check if the payment meets a certain criteria (e.g., amount > $100).
4. If it does, construct a message.
5. Make an HTTP request to the Slack API to post that message.

While this works, it introduces several points of failure and maintenance headaches:

• No Observability: If the Slack API is temporarily down, did the notification fail? How would you even know without digging through logs?
• Poor Error Handling: The function needs custom logic for retries, dead-letter queues, and alerting, adding complexity.
• Hardcoded Logic: The Stripe processing logic is now tightly coupled to the Slack notification logic. What if you also want to send an email? You have to modify this specific function.
• Secret Sprawl: Your Stripe webhook secret and your Slack bot token now live in the environment variables of this one function.

This approach creates a system that is brittle and hard to maintain. There's a better way.

The Actions.do Philosophy: Composable, Reusable Building Blocks

At Actions.do, we treat every discrete business task as an Action: a versioned, secure, and independently executable API. An Action is the fundamental building block for modern task automation.

For our Stripe-to-Slack workflow, we won't build one monolithic function. Instead, we'll create two distinct and reusable Actions:

1. process-stripe-event: An Action that ingests a Stripe webhook, verifies it, and decides if another task should be triggered.
2. send-slack-message: A generic Action that takes a channel and a message and posts it to Slack.

This separation is key. The send-slack-message Action can now be called by any part of your system—not just the Stripe webhook handler. This is the power of turning business logic into composable API Actions.

Building the Workflow: A Step-by-Step Guide

Let's build this workflow using the Actions.do TypeScript SDK.

Step 1: Create the send-slack-message Action

First, we'll define a generic Action for sending Slack messages. This Action's sole responsibility is to communicate with the Slack API. It knows nothing about Stripe.

// actions/send-slack-message.ts

import { IncomingWebhook } from '@slack/webhook';

// Assume SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL is stored as a secure secret in Actions.do
const webhook = new IncomingWebhook(process.env.SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL);

// The 'define' function from the .do SDK creates your Action
export default defineAction({
  name: 'send-slack-message',
  // Define the expected inputs for type-safety
  input: {
    channel: string,
    text: string,
  },
  async handler({ payload }) {
    await webhook.send({
      channel: payload.channel,
      text: payload.text,
    });
    return { success: true, message: `Message sent to ${payload.channel}` };
  },
});

Once you deploy this Action using our SDK, it instantly becomes available as an API endpoint. Anyone on your team can now send a Slack message with a simple API call, without needing to know anything about the Slack API or where the webhook URL is stored.

Step 2: Create the process-stripe-event Action

Next, we create the Action that will act as our webhook endpoint. This Action will contain the business logic specific to processing Stripe events.

// actions/process-stripe-event.ts

import { dotdo } from '@do-sdk';
import Stripe from 'stripe';

// Initialize the Stripe and .do clients
const stripe = new Stripe(process.env.STRIPE_SECRET_KEY);
const client = dotdo.init({ apiKey: process.env.DOTDO_API_KEY });
const stripeWebhookSecret = process.env.STRIPE_WEBHOOK_SECRET;

export default defineAction({
  name: 'process-stripe-event',
  async handler({ request }) {
    // 1. Verify the webhook signature for security
    const event = stripe.webhooks.constructEvent(
      request.body,
      request.headers['stripe-signature'],
      stripeWebhookSecret
    );

    // 2. Implement business logic
    if (event.type === 'invoice.payment_succeeded') {
      const invoice = event.data.object as Stripe.Invoice;
      const amount = invoice.amount_paid / 100; // Amount is in cents

      // Only trigger for high-value payments
      if (amount >= 100) {
        const message = `🎉 New high-value subscription! Customer: ${invoice.customer_email}, Amount: $${amount}.`;

        // 3. Execute the 'send-slack-message' Action!
        await client.actions.execute({
          name: 'send-slack-message',
          payload: {
            channel: '#sales',
            text: message,
          },
        });
      }
    }

    return { received: true };
  },
});

Step 3: Connect and Deploy

After deploying both Actions, the final step is to point your Stripe webhook to the secure endpoint URL provided by Actions.do for your process-stripe-event Action.

That's it. Your workflow is live.

The Result: Resilient, Observable "Services-as-Software"

What have we accomplished?

• Decoupled Logic: The Stripe processing logic is completely separate from the Slack notification logic. You can now reuse the send-slack-message Action for new user signups, critical bug alerts, or anything else, simply by calling its API.
• Built-in Resilience: What happens if the Slack API is down when Stripe sends an event? Actions.do automatically captures the failure, logs the full context, and can even retry the execution according to your configuration. You get robust error handling for free.
• Effortless Scalability: As your business grows, this workflow scales automatically without you ever touching infrastructure.
• Centralized Management: Both Actions are versioned, managed, and monitored from a single platform. No more hunting down logs across different cloud providers.

You haven't just connected two services. You've created a piece of Services-as-Software—a powerful, automated business process built from composable, code-driven Actions.

Ready to stop writing brittle glue code and start building powerful agentic workflows? Sign up for free at Actions.do and turn your business logic into powerful, reusable API Actions today.