What is wrong with my paypal process to receive webhook notifications? - paypal

Question

So this is what i did so far and it doesn't work, i will appreciate any help on the matter:
my goal is to post back any webhook event that occur in my paypal sandbox account.
So i have 2 accounts,
one that belongs to the receiver of the money, call it "facilitator",
one that belong to the "buyer",
Now in my account,there is a Sandbox webhooks configuration, so i entered the following:
https://csdieuqkzo.localtunnel.me
goes without saying that this comes from localtunnel.me.
So in my project, i do a simple sale using the api... this is the full create sale process:
$payer = new Payer();
$payer->setPayment_method('paypal');
//dd($payer);
$item = new Item();
$item->setQuantity('1');
$item->setName('benny');
$item->setPrice('7.41');
$item->setCurrency('USD');
$item->setSku('blah');
// //var_dump($item);
$items = new ItemList();
$items->addItem($item);
//var_dump($items);
$amountDetails = new Details();
$amountDetails->setSubtotal('7.41');
$amountDetails->setTax('0.03');
$amountDetails->setShipping('0.03');
$amount = new Amount();
$amount->setCurrency('USD');
$amount->setTotal('7.47');
$amount->setDetails($amountDetails);
$transaction = new Transaction();
$transaction->setAmount($amount);
$transaction->setDescription('This is the payment transaction description.');
$transaction->setItemList($items);
// echo '<pre>';
// print_r($transaction);
$RedirectUrls = new RedirectUrls();
$RedirectUrls ->setReturnUrl('https://csdieuqkzo.localtunnel.me/#/pricing');
$RedirectUrls ->setCancelUrl('https://csdieuqkzo.localtunnel.me/#/');
$payment = new Payment();
$payment->setIntent('sale');
$payment->setPayer($payer);
$payment->setTransactions(array($transaction));
$payment->setRedirectUrls($RedirectUrls);
// echo '<pre>';
// print_r($payment);
// dd();
$response = $payment->create($this->apiContext)->toarray();
Session::put('pay_id',$response['id']);
return Response::json($response);
After this there is a redirect to paypal, approval and when it comes back to my site, it excute with the following:
$payerId = Input::get('payerId');
$payment = Payment::get(Session::get('pay_id'), $this->apiContext);
//return $payerId;
$paymentExecution = new PaymentExecution();
$paymentExecution->setPayer_id($payerId);
$approval = $payment->execute($paymentExecution, $this->apiContext)->toarray();
return Response::json($approval);
Then an object is coming in saying the state of this transaction is approved, super, but i don't see any post to the webhook url i defined earlier...Now how did i test it?
I wrote a simple script to the post method of my root (in laravel):
Route::post('/',function(){
$myfile = fopen("bennyfile.txt", "a") or die("Unable to open file!");
$txt = "\nouterequested";
fwrite($myfile, $txt);
fclose($myfile);
});
Means whenever a post request is coming to the following url (in my case, a post to the root of:https://csdieuqkzo.localtunnel.me
I just want to add a line, that's it...but it doesn't update anything!...
for example if i do a post request from postman to the same place, all is good, but when a sale is approved, or any other action, nothing is happening.
Why?

Answer 1

This is a paypal document which helps you understand how webhooks works.
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/integration/direct/rest-webhooks-overview/
webhooks is http call back mechanism, ideally, you will need a valid url as your webhooks endpoint to test the webhooks notification message posted by PayPal. If you did sale using paypal wallet, you should get PayPal's webhooks notification message in JSON format at your endpoint. webhooks doesn't support direct credit card case yet.
If you want to test your listener script on local, you can use postman tool to post the sample message to your local url and test.

Answer 2

Using "localhost" isn't going to work because when PayPal's servers hits that address they're just hitting themselves. You need to setup DNS to point a domain to a virtual server on your local machine instead so that you can use a fully qualified domain name instead of localhost.