Billing System Models

Author

Garry Dolley

Date

06-21-2011

This repository aims to be a collection of ActiveRecord models that can be included as part of a merchant billing system.

This is a work in progress and you should expect the models / methods / interfaces to change at any time. I have also ripped parts of it out from an existing system, so there are some MySQL specific statements in the migrations.

As of 2012, I am successfully using these models in a production system, invoicing and charging a fairly large set of customers.

The models included are:

• Charge
• CreditCard
• Invoice
• InvoicesLineItem
• InvoicesPayment
• Payment
• SalesReceipt
• SalesReceiptsLineItem

Supported processors:

• PayPal (Business or Premier account required)

Requirements

• ActiveRecord
• ActiveMerchant
• ActionMailer
• MySQL
• GnuPG
• FactoryGirl (for running specs)

Installation

cd vendor/plugins/
git clone git@github.com:up_the_irons/billing-system-models.git

Then run the migrations under db/migrate.

Lastly,

Copy lib/gateway.yml.example to lib/gateway.yml and fill in the fields in that file.

Put your API key file in lib/ and tell lib/gateway.yml about it using the "api_key_filename" parameter. In the example file, the API key file is named my_paypal.pem

There is one block for the "live" environment, where real credit cards are charged, and one block for the "test" environment, which mocks everything through PayPal's Sandbox and no real money is exchanged.

Copy lib/gpg.yml.example to lib/gpg.yml and fill in the recipient field. This should be the GPG UID of the user whose public key will be used to encrypt credit card data stored in the database. The path to your GPG binary and homedir may also be specified.

Other Processors

ActiveMerchant supports a large list of credit card processors / gateways. To use these tools with a gateway besides PayPal, modify gateway.rb to suit your needs. It should be relatively straight forward.

See: http://www.activemerchant.org

Notifications

A BillingSystemModels::Mailer subclass of ActionMailer::Base exists to send emails if/when appropriate.

For these to work, you need to copy the email view templates into your app and customize them as needed.

For example:

cd $RAILS_ROOT
mkdir -p app/views/billing_system_models/mailer
cp vendor/plugins/billing-system-models/lib/views/* \
   app/views/billing_system_models/mailer

To change the email headers (subject, from, etc...), which you will most certainly want to do, do the following:

BillingSystemModels::Mailer.decline_notice_headers = {
  :subject => "Y U NO PAY?",
  :from    => "billing@mycompany.com"
}

See BillingSystemModels::Mailer for a full list of modifiable headers.

TODO

• Make a gem version
• Remove MySQL specific statements from migrations
• Create a rake task to run migrations for installation

Author

Garry C. Dolley

gdolley [at] NOSPAM- arpnetworks.com

AIM: garry97531

IRC: I am up_the_irons on Freenode.

Formatting

This README is formatted in reStructredText [RST]. It has the best correlation between what a document looks like as plain text vs. its formatted output (HTML, LaTeX, etc...). What I like best is, markup doesn't look like markup, even though it is.

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2011 ARP Networks, Inc.

Released under the MIT license.

RST

http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html