Integrate MPesa or Tigopesa on your Laravel Website including other Payment Gateways

Bryce on Feb 2, 2019

Pesapal

Over the last decade, Eastern African countries saw a transition in the way day-to day payments are transacted. Mobile and telecommunication companies have made this possible using mobile money services such as MPesa, AirtelMoney, TigoPesa just to mention a few.

`Pesapal Payment Gateway`

For web applications it hasn't been easy to integrate mobile money systems as the direct APIs have been expensive and or difficult to use. The emergence of Pesapal has filled this void and made it easier to integrate using their simple API. I have managed to compile the PHP API for Pesapal and created a package that can be used with Laravel.

`Requirements`

A fresh or pre-existing Laravel installation (at best works with Laravel 5.5 and above)
PHP 7 installed
composer
cURL extension for PHP installed

If you are not sure you have cURL installed, go to the root of your project and add the following lines inside your composer.json file,

"require": {
        "ext-curl": "*"
    }

`Install the package`

The Laravel package for Pesapal can be found in its github repository on here. To install it inside the root of you project run the following in the terminal;

composer require bryceandy/laravel_pesapal

`Files and Configuration`

After composer has downloaded all files successfully, inside your config/app.php file, add the following in the providers array

'providers' => [
        /*
         * Application Service Providers...
         */
        Bryceandy\Laravel_Pesapal\PesapalServiceProvider::class,
    ]

Then we can publish the package into our project using the command;

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Bryceandy\Laravel_Pesapal\PesapalServiceProvider"

When it runs successfully, you will now have the following in your project;

A TransactionController.php within app/Http/Controllers
One new model app/Transaction.php
Three route views inside resources/views/pesapal/.
A configuration file config/pesapal.php
A directory named pesapal in the root, which shouldn't be touched
A migration to create a transactions table inside database/migrations/.

NOTE: In order for this migration to work smoothly, make sure you have first_name, last_name and email fields in your users migration and password field be nullable. Lastly in the User model, create a $fillable array and add the previous 3 fields aforementioned.

But now since you have all these files you can modify them however you want to suit your project. Finally you can migrate your tables;

php artisan migrate

`Your Routes`

The 3 new routes you now have under resources/views/pesapal/ all have an important role.

details.blade.php view will display details that your user will input, and its URL is yourSite.com/details

details

iframe.blade.php view will display payment options as seen below, to arrive to this view a user needs to fill the details above correctly in the details view. Also try to make the 'reference' detail auto-generated in the controller depending on your project needs.

payment options

lastly, the callback_example.blade.php view will be the page which displays the payment status after a user makes a transaction.

`Configuration`

Head over to demo if you want a testing environment or live for a live integration and create a business account. You will easily obtain a key-secret pair for your integration.

pesapal.com

Then inside your .env file, create these environment variables;

PESPAL_KEY='yourConsumerKey'
PESAPAL_SECRET='yourConsumerSecret'

end

`Configure Pesapal Settings`

For live accounts, in order to receive notifications for every payment from Pesapal, we need to set our IPN listener URL. On your Pesapal dashboard, go to Account Settings and click IPN Settings. Fill in your domain, example yourSite.com, then the IPN listener URL as yourSite.com/pesapal/ipn.php

Thats all there is to it, you can now visit the details page and start making payments!