Paystack Payment Initialization using PHP Laravel Backend

Initializing paystack transaction from your backend is safer way of building a secured payment integration.

For this content, I will be using postman for my testing. If you are new to postman, check my post on how to setup postman with laravel backend.

Create a Route

Create a route on api.php file with any preferred name.

Route::post('initialize_paystack', [PaystackController::class, 'initialize_paystack'])->name('api.initialize_paystack');

Create a Controller

For this solution, I have a controller called PaystackController and a function inside the controller called initialize_paystack.

To initialize payment, see the code below.

private $initialize_url = "https://api.paystack.co/transaction/initialize";

public function initialize_paystack(Request $request)
    {
        // $amount = number_format($request->amount,2);
        $fields = [
            'email' => $request->user()->email,
            'amount' => $request->amount * 100,
        ];
        $fields_string = http_build_query($fields);
        //open connection
        $ch = curl_init();
        //set the url, number of POST vars, POST data

        curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL, $this->initialize_url);
        curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POST, true);
        curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $fields_string);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(
        "Authorization: Bearer ".env('PAYSTACK_SECRET_KEY'),

        "Cache-Control: no-cache",

        ));

        //So that curl_exec returns the contents of the cURL; rather than echoing it

        curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); 
        //execute post

        $result = curl_exec($ch);
        $response = json_decode($result);

        return json_encode([
                'data' => $response,
                'metadata' => [
                    'payment_for' => 'token'
                ]
           ]);
    }

Send data from postman

To trigger the initialization, I will send the amount from postman which can also be sent from your frontend.

Your response will return payment link, which you can use to make a payment or return back to the frontend.

"data": {
        "status": true,
        "message": "Authorization URL created",
        "data": {
            "authorization_url": "https://checkout.paystack.com/zbm34791mm5t9wk",
            "access_code": "zbm34791mm5t9wk",
            "reference": "dod8hghbhc"
        }
    },

The image above is response gotten after clicking the payment link.