Braintree Integration on Laravel

A payment gateway now made even simpler to use

Braintree is one of the easiest payment gateways that I’ve encountered and one of the trickiest to setup. Now, that I feel quite comfortable with the setup, here’s a got through towards a basic setup for your own app. I used laravel at the time, so I’ll be telling how to setup braintree in laravel, but it’s pretty much similar for other frameworks and languages too.

Steps to Setup Braintree for your project

• Signup an account credentials with braintree website. Braintree offers a free sandbox account in which you can do as much testing as you want, which is really cool.

• Next you will be directed to your dashboard where you can your keys, public key, private key, merchant ID, etc. We’ll come to these later.

• Now go back to your laravel project and add the following to your composer.json file:

  "require": {
  "braintree/braintree_php" : "2.33.0"
  }

  Or whatever version is latest at the time.

• And run a composer update from your terminal:

  composer update

• Now, include the key file that you got of your sandbox account in the config files. You can create a local folder of your app.php and put all of them in there:

  'braintree_environment' => '',
  'braintree_merchantid' => '',
  'braintree_public_key' => '',
  'braintree_private_key' => ''

• Now, you are all set to start with braintree. Now open up your controller and write the following to create a client token, which you will need to setup the payment form:

  \$clientToken = Braintree_ClientToken::generate();

  And in the client-side you will need to include this with something like this:

  braintree.setup("CLIENT-TOKEN-FROM-SERVER", "custom", {id: "checkout"});

• Next, you will need to setup your client-side, i.e. the payment form part. To do that, open up your view file and put in something like this(Of course only the fields that you require. This is only a minimalist example of what you can do with it):

  <form id="checkout" action="/your/server/endpoint" method="post">
    <input data-braintree-name="number" value="4111111111111111">
    <input data-braintree-name="cvv" value="100">
  
    <input data-braintree-name="expiration_date" value="10/20">
  
    <!-- you can also split expiration date into two fields -->
    <input data-braintree-name="expiration_month" value="10">
    <input data-braintree-name="expiration_year" value="2020">
  
    <input data-braintree-name="postal_code" value="94107">
    <input data-braintree-name="cardholder_name" value="John Smith">
  
    <input type="submit" id="submit" value="Pay">
  </form>

And the scipt to follow up:

client.tokenizeCard({
number: "4111111111111111",
cardholderName: "John Smith",
// You can use either expirationDate
expirationDate: "10/20",
// or expirationMonth and expirationYear
expirationMonth: "10",
expirationYear: "2015",
// CVV if required
cvv: "832",
// Address if AVS is on
billingAddress: {
postalCode: "94107"
}
}, function (err, nonce) {
// Send nonce to your server
});

• Now, when you sent the request to braintree with these data, braintree replies with a payment nounce which you can use to charge the customer. You can do something like this:

  $result = Braintree_Transaction::sale(array(
        'amount' => 10,
        'paymentMethodNonce' => $nounce
  ));

Now, that’s all that’s needed to complete a full payment gateway.

Simple enough. Isn’t it? Go ahead! Try it out yourself.