This is a fairly simple application using React on the frontend, NodeJS on the backend and a text file as our database which demonstrates how to make calls against the Plaid Income API.
To get the server running...
- cd into the server directory and run
npm install - Copy over
.env.templateto.env - Copy over
user_data.json.templatetouser_data.json - Add your client ID and secret to the .env file you just created
- Run
npm start(ornpm run watchif you want to make changes to the file)
In lieu of setting up an actual database to keep track of user info, we store everything to a flat JSON-encoded file (the user_data.json file). It's not very scalable, but it survives server restarts, which is nice. If you do want to start "fresh" with a new user, stop the server, re-copy user_data.json.template to user_data.json, then restart the server.
To get the client running...
- cd into the client directory and run
npm install - run
npm start. This will start React in development mode, with automatic reloading and all that fun stuff.
Go ahead and open up the client page in the browser if it doesn't open automatically (by default, this should be http://localhost:3000)
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When you first start up the app, you'll be prompted to connect to a bank to load up your liabilities, and connect to your Payroll provider (or bank) to load up your sources of income! We provide you with the opportunity to add additional sources of income as well.
Important
When adding liabilities in the Sandbox environment, you must select a liabilities-compatible account, like a credit card. Picking an account that doesn't work with liabilities will cause link to fail with a "no supported liabilities accounts" error.
When adding bank income in the Sandbox environment, you must use a non-OAuth bank (like Houndstooth Bank) and supply the credentials user_bank_income and {} and the MFA code of 1234 if you're asked for it. This is different from the credentials you will be shown at the bottom of the page! For more test accounts that work great with Income, see the docs.
In the debug panel (the little accordion component at the bottom of the screen) is a button that simulates what the Income flow might look like if you were to run an income pre-check call with an employer that results in a "HIGH" confidence level. This call only works in Sandbox mode.
When you're developing in the Sandbox environment, Document Income data is available almost immediately. In Production, however, it may take several minutes for Document Income data to be complete. In those situations, you want to listen for the INCOME_VERIFICATION webhook to know when it's safe to fetch document data.
In our sample application, we have set up a second server on port 8001 to listen for webhooks. If you want to expose this port to the outside world so it can receive webhooks from Plaid, you might want to use a tool like ngrok to create a tunnel between the outside world and localhost:8001. If you have ngrok installed, you can do this by running the following command:
ngrok http 8001
Once you've done this, you'll need to tell the sample app about the location of your webhook. You can do this by copying the domain that ngrok sets up into your .env file as the WEBHOOK_URL entry. Don't forget the /server/receive_webhook path at the end!
WEBHOOK_URL=https://1234-56-789-123-456.ngrok.io/server/receive_webhook/
It's best to do this before you start up the server, but you can also submit the new webhook URL into the debug panel (the little accordion component at the bottom of the browser screen) and that will also change the location of the webhook for all future calls.
For more information on Plaid webhooks, check out our documentation or you can refer to our video tutorial.
- Display a more meaningful message for when you have pending document data
- Clean up some of the Chakra UI components a bit
- Make the error messaging fancier than an alert box
- Let you know if financing is available so we have a happy ending to our story.
- (Maybe) Add Socket.io support so our server can tell our client when to fetch document data
