oldfartdeveloper / paypal_ipn_forwarder

Forward PayPal IPN notifications to your development machine

UNDER CONSTRUCTION!!!

NOTE: Archived on Oct 6, 2021

Nothing here is ready for prime-time yet.

A Proxy to Forward your PayPal Sandbox's IPN's to your Development Machine

What this app does

Features

1. This Elixir app only needs to be set up once to handle multiple PayPal sandboxes and multiple development machines.
2. PayPal IPNs received while the target development machine is unavailable are responded to with a success response by this app. The resulting IPN record is (not) queued.

Prerequisites

If you have the following resources, then this project may be useful to you:

Server Requirements

1. A publicly-facing server that can host this project's Elixir program¹. Both your PayPal sandbox and development computer must be able to perform HTTP requests against this server.

Target Development Machine Requiremetns

The developer's computer must be able to host Elixir at the same revision level as for the server.

Installation

You will need the identifiers for your PayPal sandboxes and your corresponding development computers as follows:

PayPal Sandbox ID

For this, you can use the Secure Merchant Id located which can be found in the PayPal sandbox. In the profile tab, it is the second item which is presented.

Development ID

For this, the developer's email is used in order to deliver some notifications and identify the developer.

Run Tests

To Do

Configure the IPN address in your PayPal sandbox(es).

In each PayPal sandbox, configure the server's URL for PayPal to send the IPN messages to.

PayPal's guide describes how to do this in section 3 on page 23.

Configure the Router Component on Each Development Computer

This consists of installing the router gem and creating two aliases so that the developer does not have to find the id of the Sandbox every time that they run the gem.

The aliases should be saved in a bash config file (or equivalent) using:

alias paypal_testing_on='ruby start_paypal sandbox_id developer_id'
alias paypal_testing_off='ruby stop_paypal sandbox)id developer_id'

where sandbox_id is the id of the sandbox that the developer will be using and developer_id is the email of the developer.

Running the Router

To start the router:

 paypal_testing_on

To stop:

 stop

If you inadvertently control-c out of the terminal window, that will not stop the process. In this case, in another terminal you can stop the router process by:

 paypal_testing_off

Run on Your Server

TODO

Start your Development computer's Router that talks with the server app

TODO

Start your Development computer's server that talks w/ its PayPal sandbox

When you set up recurring payments on PayPal, PayPal will start sending IPN notifications to you whenever it deems necessary. This will happen, among other activities, when it notifies you that it charged a credit card or that someone issued a refund on the PayPal sandbox side.

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

1: TODO: Figure out how Elixir will be packaged. ↩