Establishing connectivity

Once you have exchanged keys with Google and have your vendor ID (PIAID), you are ready to establish connectivity with the Virtual Cards API is to and complete a successful echo test. We provide code samples to help you perform these tests using the encryptions keys we exchange to ensure your configuration is correct and that your infrastructure is properly routing our requests to your host. Once you have successfully completed echo tests using one of our code samples, you can update your implementation to communicate with our APIs.

Echo from Partner to Google

Google hosts an echo endpoint which you can call to test your ability to successfully communicate with our servers. You should use the encryption keys you exchanged with Google when forming your echo request and parsing our response.

Using our code samples to echo Google

Once you have one of our code samples configured and running, you can trigger an echo request to Google by using curl or a similar tool as follows:

curl -H "Content-type: text/plain" -X POST -d ‘hello’ https://{YOUR_HOST}/echo

If your keys are properly set up, you should see a successful echo response.

Echo request code samples

Debugging errors during initial development to establish connectivity can be difficult since our API returns 404s for requests with PGP encryption errors. And, all responses are encrypted and sent as an octet-stream, which can further complicate initial connectivity work.

There are a number of resources to help you get started:

Java implementation for encryption and decryption
Sample code showing how to successfully perform bidirectional echo tests
Codelabs that walk through our code samples

Code sample downloads

The following code samples are fully working examples that can call the Google hosted echo API. Note that the samples also include code for hosting your own echo endpoint. The Virtual Cards API does not need that capability so you should focus your attention on the echo request to Google's endpoint.

Java Node.js

Codelab walkthroughs

The following codelabs walk through our Java and Node.js sample implementations to help you quickly come up to speed with how they work and the key configuration settings you need to adjust to get them working.