PayFlow recurring billing with ActiveMerchant
Today we are going to look at using ActiveMerchant to set up a recurring billing subscription with PayFlow .
PayFlow is Paypal’s payment gateway and you need to setup a PayFlow account.
IMPORTANT! This is separate from Paypal’s development sandbox. Follow these steps to setup a Payflow testing account
- Go to https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_payflow-get-started-outside
and fill in the details for an account. - When you get to the page where you need to enter your payment information, hit Save and Exit. This will create a testing PayFlow account for you.
- You will be sent an email with your partner ID and your vendor login. Take note of your partner ID as this will be important later.
- You should now be able to login at https://manager.paypal.com/
Now that you have a PayFlow account, you can use ActiveMerchant to setup payments. For now we will muck around in irb to test that methods out.
So lets open up irb and start by including the active merchant gem and setting ActiveMerchant to test mode
kongy@Deadpool: $ irb irb(main):001:0> require 'rubygems' irb(main):002:0> require 'active_merchant' irb(main):003:0> ActiveMerchant::Billing::Base.mode = :test
Now lets setup the gateway.
gateway = ActiveMerchant::Billing::PayflowGateway.new(:login => 'PAYFLOW_LOGIN', :password => 'PAYFLOW_PASSWORD', :partner => 'PARTNER_ID')
This creates the gateway that we will be using to request purchases. By default ActiveMerchant passes PAYPAL as the partner value if you leave it out. I believe that this is the default for US PayFlow account. For my Aussie one, I received a VSA partner_id. I would suggest putting it in there anyway.
PayFlow Testing only accepts testing credit cards numbers. You can grab them from the PayFlow recurring billing documentation found here. Here is a quick list which I can’t guarantee will be up to date.
| American Express | 378282246310005 |
| American Express | 371449635398431 |
| American Express Corporate | 378734493671000 |
| Diners Club | 30569309025904 |
| Diners Club | 38520000023237 |
| Discover | 6011111111111117 |
| Discover | 6011000990139424 |
| JCB | 3530111333300000 |
| JCB | 3566002020360505 |
| MasterCard | 5555555555554444 |
| MasterCard | 5105105105105100 |
| Visa | 4111111111111111 |
| Visa | 4012888888881881 |
| Visa | 4222222222222 |
So lets create a Mastercard credit card.
irb(main):004:0> credit_card = ActiveMerchant::Billing::CreditCard.new( :number => '5105105105105100', :month => '9', :year => '2007', :first_name => 'Mal', :last_name => 'Reynolds', :verification_value => '123', :type => 'master' )
Now we are ready to start billing. If you want to setup a one time payment it is quite easy.
irb(main):007:0> response = gateway.purchase(1000, credit_card) irb(main):008:0> response.success? => true
If you go into your Paypal Manager and search for transactions you should see it appear.
To setup a recurring billing we need to use the recurring method of the gateway. The recurring method accepts the amount in cents, the credit card object and the time intervals to charge the card, at a minimum. There are other options available which you can find here. Lets charge $10/month
irb(main):009:0> response = gateway.recurring(100, credit_card, :periodicity => :monthly) irb(main):010:0> response.success? => true irb(main):011:0> response.profile_id => "RT0000000002"
You can view the recurring billings in your Paypal Manager by clicking on Service Settings > Recurring Billings > Manage Profiles. You will probably want to store the profile_id in your database for when you need to edit details of the recurring billing. You can do it quite simply by calling the recurring method again. Let’s change the amount we want to bill to $20/week.
irb(main):0012:0> response = gateway.recurring(2000, nil, :profile_id => "RT0000000001", :periodicity => :weekly) irb(main):013:0> response.success? => true
You can see here that we no longer need to pass in the credit card since we have the profile_id. We update the amount, and change the periodicity of the billing.
And that’s it.
When to use Nested Controllers in your Rails apps
Nested controllers are great. I don’t care that they have a stigma attached to them they work well and make sense especially if your rails application has a Admin section for example. This allows you to easy separate the admin logic into its own controllers etc keeping your code clean and easy to manage.
So thats what we are going to do for this example.
Step 1. Create your admin controller
You can use whichever process works best for you, but for this we are going to use script/generate:
./script/generate controller admin
Step 2. Create your user controller
You can use whichever process works best for you, but for this we are going to use script/generate:
./script/generate controller admin/users
Step 3. Check to ensure proper inheritance
The nested users controller should look something like so:
class Admin::UsersController < ApplicationController end
Step 4. Create the Routes
The nested users controller should look something like so:
map.namespace :admin do |admin| admin.resources :users end
Before rails 2+ you had to do like like we have below. Personally l don’t mind it makes it a little easier to read but either option works fine
map.resource(:admin) do |admin| admin.resources(:users, :controller => 'admin/users') end
Step 5. Wait there is no step 5 your done
Now when you need to link to any of these actions its very simple keeping in mind that users is nested under the admin controller so all you have to do to create a link that goes to the index action on the nested users controller is add the admin prefix before
link_to "Users", admin_users_url
The same applies when you are wanting to link to the show action of users all you do is loose the “s” on users as you would normally
link_to "View User", admin_user_url(@user)
You can see a list of all the routes you have available to you by going to the root directory of your project in terminal and typing
rake routes
Using passenger to run your rails applications when developing
If your like me and sick of having to run ./script/server every time you want to start your rails app using passenger locally is for you then. First thing is to install passenger like so
sudo gem install passenger
Then you need to install the apache module for passenger.
sudo passenger-install-apache2-module
Now once you do this you will be told to all the following lines to your httpd.conf file in apache. Now you can just add these lines no problems but l like to have it in its own conf file and since apache will also load all conf files in /etc/apache2/other/ directory just create a passenger.conf file and add those lines in. Now these lines are different depending on how you installed ruby. I installed it in user/local keeping the orginal ruby version that ships with mac clean so mine looks like so
LoadModule passenger_module /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.5/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so PassengerRoot /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.5 PassengerRuby /usr/local/bin/ruby
To create the new passenger.conf file just run the below command assuming you have textmate installed.
mate /etc/apache2/other/passenger.conf
Once you have cut and pasted those lines in save it and close the file. You then need to download the passenger preference pane. Here is a link to the latest build passenger-preference-pane1.3. Download and install then fire it up.
Now unlock it if need be and click on the + button to add a new site. A window will pop up and now just select the root of your rails app and click “open”. You can now change the address if need be but just defaults to (rails_app_name).local. Hit apply and your good to go.
So go back to your browser and type in that address and it will fire up and your up and running. Now you wont see the log like you are used to since your not running webrick etc but all you have to do is tail the development log by going to the root dir of your application in terminal and typing the following
tail -f log/development.log
And that’s it. You will need to restart passenger if you change the environment.rb file but thats simple enough via the preference pane. So no more ./script/server yay
no such file to load — capistrano/ext/multistage
I ran into this error the other day when running “cap -T”
/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require’: no such file to load — capistrano/ext/multistage (LoadError)
So to fix this l did the following
sudo gem uninstall capistrano
sudo rm -rf /usr/bin/cap
sudo gem install capistrano-ext
sudo gem install capistrano
Needed to do “sudo rm -rf /usr/bin/cap” as doing just the uninstall of capistrano didn’t remove all the files l needed it to.
Setting up a new Rails app with Git
Ok so you want to be cool like all other rails developers out there and use Git for your projects. Here is a quick run down of how you might go about it.
Firstly create your rails app and using terminal go into the root of that project.
Then create a top, project-level .gitignore file. I use textmate so this can be done like so
$ mate .gitignore
Then add the following to the .gitignore file
.DS_Store log/*.log tmp/**/* config/database.yml db/*.sqlite3
You can also add more directories or files in here to ignore like css files if using sass for example, or your uploads directory.
Create some .gitignore files so the empty directories get tracked:
$ touch log/.gitignore $ touch tmp/.gitignore
and finally commit that bad boy
$ git add . $ git commit -m "First commit"
Running git add will tell git to track all the new files (Since first commit thats all of them). The commit will commit to your local Git repository and all that is left to do would be to add it to GitHub for example and your in business.
Restarting your rails application after deployment on Passenger
This is something that l always forget to add the first time l deploy my rails applications that run on Apache + Passenger.
namespace :deploy do
desc "Restarting mod_rails with restart.txt"
task :restart, :roles => :app, :except => { :no_release => true } do
run "touch #{current_path}/tmp/restart.txt"
end
[:start, :stop].each do |t|
desc "#{t} task is a no-op with mod_rails"
task t, :roles => :app do ; end
end
end
This will tell Capistrano to restart the server the passenger way by touching the restart.txt file in the tmp dir rather then trying to restart using mongrel. Lets hope l don’t forget next time
