README

A PHP class for handling Instant Payment Notifications (IPN) from PayPal.

Features:

• Switch between live and sandbox by setting the use_sandbox property.
• Supports HTTPS (SSL) transactions by default (HTTP is discontinued by PayPal as of 2016).
• Supports both cURL and fsockopen network libraries by setting the use_curl property (cURL is recommended).
• Verifies an HTTP 200 response status code from the PayPal server.
• Get detailed plain text reports of the entire IPN using the getTextReport() method for use in emails and logs to administrators.
• Throws various exceptions to differentiate between common errors in code or server configuration versus invalid IPN responses.

Requirements:

• PHP 5.3.0 or newer.
• cURL extension (if use_curl property is enabled).

Documentation

The source code contains PHPDoc style comments which essentially provide a function reference.

Example scripts ranging from basic IPN verification to a complete order processing chain, and a sample report as returned by the getTextReport() method, can be found in the Examples folder.

This package is available via Composer at dezlov/php-paypal-ipn.

Getting Started

You should understand how the IPN process works conceptually and you should understand when and why you would be using IPN. Reading the PayPal Instant Payment Notification Guide is a good place to start.

You should also have a PayPal Sandbox Account with a test buyer account and a test seller account. When logged into your sandbox account there is an IPN simulator under the "Test Tools" menu which you can use to test your IPN listener.

Once you have your sandbox account setup, you simply create a PHP script that will be your IPN listener. In that script, use the IpnListener() class as demonstrated in the Examples.

Also consider reading this in-depth tutorial about the IPN process and how to implementing an IPN listener script in PHP.

History

Changes between versions are documented in the CHANGELOG.md.

This library was forked from WadeShuler/PHP-PayPal-IPN which in turn was forked from Quixotix/PHP-PayPal-IPN.

Below is a brief summary of their differences and reasons for forking:

1. Quixotix's version is no longer maintained and contains various critical issues.
2. WadeShuler's version was meant to address all issues of the original version, however, several breaking changes have been made unnecessarily.
3. The goal of this version is to keep the library operational by fixing any issues, while trying to retain backward compatibility with the original version.

License

This work is licensed under GPL 2.0.

Copyright notice from the original author: LICENSE.