Going live with Okra

Once your integration is tested, you can switch to production and test some more with a 100 free API calls. Our engineers and sales team are ready to support you in launching your app.

Final steps

When you have tested your App in the sandbox environment and want to go live with your product, get in touch with the Okra Sales team.

The Sales team makes sure that you finished your onboarding and that your business needs are satisfied. The team then connects you with an Okra engineer who verifies that your integration is running optimally. Okra recommends that you take a look at the integration best practices before you switch to production.

Once your integration is verified, you need to:

  • Execute Order form and set up a settlement account.
  • Switch API keys from sandbox to production in your app.
  • Switch the callback URL from sandbox to production.
  • Define a production URL for your webhooks. Visit the Webhooks guide for more details.
  • Set the base URL of your application's requests to the production environment.
  • Okra recommends that you only launch your product to a subset of your users. This can help you fine-tune the Payments operation before scaling up to a larger user base.

Best practices

This section describes some of the key concepts and best practices that you can adopt for a smooth integration experience.

Understand how authentication works.

Okra’s API uses bearer authentication. There are 3 kinds of keys you must use in your implementation: the client token, the public API key, and the secret API key.

Visit the API overview understand more about your different API keys, and how you can retrieve them from the dashboard.

Understand the different API environments.

Okra’s API operates in two environments: sandbox and production.

  • Sandbox is for development purposes and to test Okra’s features without affecting real data. All API calls in the sandbox environment are free.
  • Production is used to access real-time data when your product is ready to live.

Make sure that you always match your API keys to the environment you are working in.

Use webhooks.

Webhooks provide real-time notifications when important events take place in your Okra integration. You can subscribe to these notifications by setting up a webhook URL in your Okra app. You will receive notifications to your system via simple HTTP requests from Okra, using JSON payloads.

Make sure that you understand these key points about using webhooks:

Use callbacks.

Callbacks provide actionable information when specific events take place in your Okra app. Improve your application's usability and enhance user experience by building workflows, front-end responses, and automation around the callbacks that Okra offers.

Make sure that you understand the different types of callbacks, and the recommended actions you can take when a callback event occurrs.

Understand the difference between webhooks and callbacks.

Webhooks notify you about updates in the Okra products that you enable in your app. Some examples when Okra sends webhook notifications:

  • a user needs reauthentication
  • an identity profile is ready
  • a user cancels a payment

Use these notifications for tasks that require a response via the API, such as asynchronous requests, retries, or any other operation that needs processing on the backend of your application.

Callback events give you detailed information about what the user does in your Okra integration. For example, you can get callbacks when:

  • specific screens load in the Okra app
  • a user has successfully connected their accounts
  • an error occurred during app initialization

Use these callbacks to build front-end logic in your app, like displaying success or error messages or advancing your users in the app workflow.

Handle API responses appropriately.

Make sure that your integration handles:

  • Paginated responses.
  • null values.
  • 204 - No content responses. Some API endpoints return this status code, with no content in the body of the response.
  • 400, 401, 500, and timeout errors. Okra recommends that you log the request_id of error responses in case you need to reach out to the Support team. This ID can help speed up the troubleshooting process.

Read more about how the handle responses from the Okra API in the API reference.

Be prepared for non-breaking changes.

The Okra team is continuously working to improve the API. This means that changes in the API may happen. Make sure that any potential non-breaking changes in Okra's API will not affect your integration. Some examples:

  • New fields or a different field order in the response body
  • Change in the number of characters in a string
  • Adding new endpoints

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