Start makes accepting payments in the Middle East ridiculously easy. Sign up for an account at https://start.payfort.com.

Using Start with your PHP project is simple.

If you're using Composer (and really, who isn't these days amirite?), you can simply run:

php composer.phar require payfort/start

.. or add a line to your composer.json file:

{
    "require": {
        "payfort/start": "*"
    }
}

Now, running php composer.phar install will pull the library directly to your local vendor folder.

Get source code of the latest release from github repository: https://github.com/payfort/start-php/releases/latest and copy it to your project.

Inside your php file add this:

<?php

require_once("path-to-start-php/Start.php");

?>

Note for Windows: Before you start development with start-php, please check that your php_curl can work with our ssl certificate (TLSv1.2). You can do this by running unit tests. If you see "SSL connection error" it means that you need to install a new php version (at least 5.5.19).

Note: If you're running on a shared host, then you may need to set the allow_url_fopen flag for the php commands. For the install command, for example, this would look like php -d allow_url_fopen=On composer.phar install. The -d overrides the php.ini settings, where allow_url_fopen is usually set to Off.

You'll need an account with Start if you don't already have one (grab one real quick at start.payfort.com and come right back .. we'll wait).

Got an account? Great .. let's do this.

To get started, you'll need to initialize Start with your secret API key. Here's how that looks (fear not .. we're using a test key, so no real money will be exchanging hands):

require_once('vendor/autoload.php'); # At the top of your PHP file

# Initialize Start object
Start::setApiKey('test_sec_k_25dd497d7e657bb761ad6');

That's it! You probably want to do something with the Start object though -- it gets really bored when it doesn't have anything to do.

Let's run a transaction, shall we.

Now, for the fun part. Here's all the code you need to process a transaction with Start:

Start_Charge::create(array(
  "amount" => 10500, // AED 105.00
  "currency" => "aed",
  "card" => array(
    "number" => "4242424242424242",
    "exp_month" => 11,
    "exp_year" => 2016,
    "cvc" => "123"
  ),
  "description" => "Charge for [email protected]"
));

This transaction should be successful since we used the 4242 4242 4242 4242 test credit card. For a complete list of test cards, and their expected output you can check out this link here.

How can you tell that it was successful? Well, if no exception is raised then you're in the clear.

Any errors that may occur during a transaction is raised as an Exception. Here's an example of how you can handle errors with Start:

try {
  // Use Start's bindings...
} catch(Start_Error_Banking $e) {
  // Since it's a decline, Start_Error_Banking will be caught
  print('Status is:' . $e->getHttpStatus() . "\n");
  print('Code is:' . $e->getErrorCode() . "\n");
  print('Message is:' . $e->getMessage() . "\n");

} catch (Start_Error_Request $e) {
  // Invalid parameters were supplied to Start's API

} catch (Start_Error_Authentication $e) {
  // There's a problem with that API key you provided

} catch (Start_Error $e) {
  // Display a very generic error to the user, and maybe send
  // yourself an email

} catch (Exception $e) {
  // Something else happened, completely unrelated to Start
  
}

It's probably a good idea to run the unit tests to make sure that everything is fine and dandy. That's also simple.. just run this command from the root of your project folder:

php vendor/bin/phpunit tests --bootstrap vendor/autoload.php

Note: you'll need to pull the development dependencies as well, using composer update --dev in order to run the test suites.

Read our Contributing Guidelines for details

Copyright (c) Payfort.