Collecting Payments

I'm not 100% sure about stripe , but I know that payment gateways like PayPal you can pay with a charge card without having to sign up or be a user. Surely stripe has a way to make a payment without being a logged in user.

I would also suggest checking things like stack overflow for similar scenarios.

but yes if you can work it out with cashier by all means do that.

Look at Stripes forums. Check with their staff. when I'm programming something new I'll try to reach out to as many resources as possible, I even had lessons from a certified public accountant before programming for a non-profit.

so definitely just don't ask here, do much more research.

I believe one can use cashier without having a user as billable object:

https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/billing#billable-model

Cashier is assuming that it’s the user model which is billable but you can actually define that in the .env

So changing environment and using the billable trait on the model of your choice should get you going

Following the Cashier documentation, I have tried to change it to my customer model.

<?php

namespace App\Models;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Factories\HasFactory;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use App\Models\Contracts;
use Laravel\Cashier\Billable;


class Customers extends Model
{
    use HasFactory;
    use Billable;

    protected $guarded = [];

    public function user() {

        return  $this->belongsTo('App\Models\User'); // where customer belongs to user with id
    }

    public function contracts() {

        // get the contracts for this user
        return $this->hasMany(Contracts::class); // example SELECT * contracts where customer_id = this customer
    }
    
}

Then I found that I had to download the migrations for Cashier in the vendor according to this; https://laravel.com/docs/8.x/billing#installation

php artisan vendor:publish --tag="cashier-migrations"

I changed vendor/laravel/cashier/database/migration to customer table.

<?php

use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;

class CreateCustomerColumns extends Migration
{
    /**
     * Run the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function up()
    {
        Schema::table('customers', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->string('stripe_id')->nullable()->index();
            $table->string('card_brand')->nullable();
            $table->string('card_last_four', 4)->nullable();
            $table->timestamp('trial_ends_at')->nullable();
        });
    }

    /**
     * Reverse the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function down()
    {
        Schema::table('customers', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->dropColumn([
                'stripe_id',
                'card_brand',
                'card_last_four',
                'trial_ends_at',
            ]);
        });
    }
}

Also, I updated the vendor/laravel/cashier/config/casher.php

vendor/laravel/cashier/

I also added this to the .env file.

CASHIER_MODEL=App\Models\Customer

I ran migration:fresh and it still has the Cashier items in the user table, not the customer table. Stuck!

The people who get paid is your users. Don't let terms throw you off.

The people paying them are their customers. Just work it out where you use laravel conventions.