This is a Django shell application that helps to collect funds from a user and monitor transaction completion using the MTN MoMo API. This project uses two publicly available utilities that are build on top of the MTN MoMo API.

• The mtnmomo library to make HTTP calls to the MoMo API
• The mtnmomo command line tool to help with generation of keys. This tool abstracts a lot of the pain involved in getting keys straight from the MoMo API. Both these utilities are available on PyLib and are open on github

• Clone the source code on github
• Install the project dependencies using pip - pip install -r requirements.txt
• Install redis on your host system. This is not a python package and will have to be installed separately.
• I would advice you create a virtual environment for this project so you do not interfere with your local python setup. For more on virtual environments, check this out.

• This tools assumes that you have an MTN MoMo developer account have subscribed to the Collections product and gotten a Primary and Secondary Key.

• Use your Primary Key to generate your User ID and API Secret which you'll use to make requests to the MoMo API. Generate these values using this command on your terminal - mtmmomo --provider <your-app-domain> --key <your-primary-key>. This command line tool will output a JSON string which contains your User ID and API Secret. We are now ready to interact with the MoMo API sandbox.

• Export 3 key variables to the virtual environment (if you are using one) - COLLECTION_USER_ID, COLLECTION_API_SECRET and COLLECTION_PRIMARY_KEY. The values of these variables have been mentioned in the previous points.

• Lastly we need to start two processes in two terminals (with the virtual env activated, if you are using one):

  • The celery worker to handle asynchronous tasks - celery -A my_fintech_tools worker -l info
  • The celery beat process to handle periodic tasks(to check on the status of transactions) - celery -A my_fintech_tools beat -l info

  Both these commands should be run in the project folder. On both terminals, remember to export the 3 environment variables as well.

• Open another terminal (with the virtual env activated, if you are using one) and run the migrations to set up the required SQLite tables python manage.py migrate.
• Now enter python manage.py shell. This will open a Python interactive shell.
• On the shell, import the model using this import statement from my_momo_app.models import MomoRequest
• You can then create your new request e.g mr = MomoRequest(mobile_no="256772123456", amount="1000", external_id="123456789", payee_note="OK", payee_message="Purchase of python library", currency="EUR"). Please note that the MTN Sandbox which we'd be using in this case currently only accepts Euros(EUR) as currency.
• Finally, save your request - mr.save()
• And that's it! The rest happens in the background. You can check your SQLite DB for the status of your request.