Integrating PayPal Instant Payment Notification (IPN)
If you are interested in receiving asynchronous notification from PayPal about the payments made to a PayPal account, then this recipe intends to cover that. This is a very useful feature provided by PayPal to integrate and automate our back-office operation (for example, initiate shipping as soon as the payment is confirmed).
Getting ready
Make sure your machine is accessible on the internet, as it is a must to implement IPN.
How to do it...
1. Install XAMPP, which provides the Apache Web server, on the machine. You may refer to Chapter 5, VirtueMart Integration, for the steps. Say, we have installed the XAMPP in
c:\xampp2. Create an IPN listener by referring to PayPal's IPN guide: https://cms.paypal.com/cms_content/US/en_US/files/developer/IPNGuide.pdf.
This guide provides a PHP implementation of the listener, which you can use to follow this recipe. Say, we have named the listener IPNListener.php.
3. Keep the
IPNListener.phpin your...
