PayPal is an online payments platform that people use to pay merchants, send money, and check out with a stored account instead of entering card details. Log in with PayPal lets apps sign customers in with their PayPal account and, with their consent, read profile details such as their name and email address.
How does the integration work?
You can use the PayPal OAuth adapter in Appwrite Auth for user authentication and management. This can be convenient for users because they can start using your app without creating a new account, and it fits stores and marketplaces whose customers already pay with PayPal.
Appwrite requests the openid, profile, and email scopes, identifies the user by their PayPal payer ID, and stores their name and primary email address. The email address is marked as verified only when PayPal reports the account as verified. PayPal also shares the user's profile photo, which Appwrite uses for user photos in Appwrite Avatars.
Appwrite has two PayPal providers. PayPal signs users in with live PayPal accounts, and PayPal Sandbox uses PayPal's sandbox environment with test accounts, so you can build and test the flow before you go live.
How to implement
To implement the PayPal OAuth adapter in Appwrite Auth, there are several steps you must complete:
Step 1: Create a PayPal app
First, sign in to the PayPal Developer Dashboard, open Apps & Credentials, and create an app. Use the Sandbox environment while you test, and create a separate app in the Live environment for production. Save the app's Client ID and Secret key 1 for later use.
On the app's page, check Log in with PayPal under Other features and select Advanced Settings. Choose the user information your app needs, including the email address, and add a privacy policy URL and a user agreement URL. You will set the Return URL in the next step.
Sandbox apps can use Log in with PayPal as soon as you save. For a live app, saving submits the feature for review by PayPal, so plan for that before you launch.
Step 2: Add the PayPal OAuth adapter to your Appwrite project
For this step, you must create an account on Appwrite Cloud or self-host Appwrite if you haven't already. In your Appwrite project, head over to the Auth page, open the Settings tab, and click PayPal under the OAuth2 Providers section. For a sandbox app, click PayPal Sandbox instead.
Enter the Client ID, and paste either of your app's secret keys into the Secret Key 1 or Secret Key 2 field. Turn the provider on and click Update.
Copy the Redirect URI shown in the provider settings. It follows this format:
https://<REGION>.cloud.appwrite.io/v1/account/sessions/oauth2/callback/paypal/<PROJECT_ID>The URI starts with the API endpoint your app uses, so on self-hosted Appwrite it starts with your own domain. The PayPal Sandbox provider has its own URI, ending in /paypalSandbox/<PROJECT_ID>. Always copy the exact value from the Console. Back in the PayPal Developer Dashboard, paste it into the Return URL field in the Log in with PayPal advanced settings and save.
PayPal doesn't accept localhost in return URLs, so when Appwrite runs on localhost it sends PayPal 127.0.0.1 instead. Register the Return URL with 127.0.0.1 in that case.
Step 3: Test the provider
Follow the OAuth 2 login flow to test your provider. Pass OAuthProvider.Paypal as the provider, or OAuthProvider.PaypalSandbox for a sandbox app, when you call createOAuth2Session from a client app or createOAuth2Token from a server. Add your app's domain as a platform in your Appwrite project so Appwrite accepts your success and failure URLs.
Read more about PayPal and Appwrite Auth
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