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Paypal Website Payments Pro with Ruby on Rails

Ben Kittrell
06/18/2006 01:07PM

Update - Paypal Website Payments Pro on Rails - Take 2

I've been writing the billing system for DoodleKit and I finally got to the actual payment authorization piece. I chose Paypal Website Payments Pro because it seemed simple in a couple of ways. First of all their pricing structure is very easy. $20/mo + a small nominal transaction fee. Most other gateways are like $10 for the gateway $10 for the merchant account, complex transaction fees, minimum transaction fees, and a $.10 fee if the payment is made on your birthday. They also have a web service API which gave me a warm fuzzy feeling inside. Every payment gateway I've ever worked with has been a real pain in the rump.

So anyway, I had this working with PHP just fine, but now it was time to get it working with Ruby. First I tried vPayPal which seemed promising. However I actually went through many different issues, which I regrettably didn't log. Most of them where issues with my environment and not vPayPal. I finally ended up with "tlsv1 alert unknown ca". This was after I had spent at least 2 weeks on this and I felt like I was getting nowhere. I can't say that the problem was with vPayPal, I'm pretty sure it was just some weird combination of circumstances.

I thought about writing my own plugin, but I knew that would come with another set of unsavory issues. Finally I found RoR::PayPal. I just followed their instructions and poof, it worked. The thing I like about this one, other than the fact that it worked for me right away, is that it's a plugin instead of a ruby library. This way I can include it with the source code and it's deployed with the app. Also it makes it easier for running multiple apps with different configurations.

All in all I would recommend RoR::PayPal for anyone looking to use Paypal Website Payment Pro with Ruby on Rails. I would also recommend Website Payments Pro in general, as it has been fairly easy to work with.

Now if I could just get someone to try it out. Anyone want to try out the payment system? I think it would be best to test out large transactions.

Comments

Mike Zornek 07/21/2006 09:26PM

Have you been able to get the express checkout stuff working via RoR::PayPal ? I need to support that aspect of WPP. Please let me know. Email if possible.

Kyle 11/14/2006 06:42PM

Thanks for the tip. Fortunately, I've only wasted a few hours on VPaypal to find that it is NOT what I am looking for.

Paul Hepworth My Website 04/04/2007 01:29AM

Thanks for the post. FYI, the link to the code is now http://elctech.com/projects/paypal.

It looks like they updated their blog recently.

Ben Kittrell 04/04/2007 12:49PM

Thanks Paul, I've updated the links.

Ben 04/27/2008 12:23AM

Hi, thanks for you the post. I'm trying it out now. I'm having trouble with the first instruction in the README. Install GEM. How is that done?

Rubens Marques My Website 10/23/2008 09:08PM

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Adam Barger 11/12/2008 12:07AM

If you're looking for a seriously good <a href="http://webstarts.com">free website</a> builder you should check this one out.

Patrick Byers My Website 03/03/2009 02:05PM

I'm on a new project where I'm trying to integrate WPP into a site. Have you found RoR::Paypal is still a good solution? Is it working with Rails 2? Paypal has an "official" list of compatible carts, so I'm hesitant to try another.

sathish 02/18/2010 12:28AM

I'm working on integrating PayPal website payment pro into my project.

I can not find ROR:PayPal blog in given link. Can you please share that blog link.

Also, Is that still be a good solution for PayPal website paymen pro solution?

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