Testing Paypal subscription IPN

Question

I\'d like to test paypal subscription IPNs, both the ones received when a subscription is created, and the ones sent later with the next payment (such as monthly if the subs

Answer 1

Hey I just wanted to throw a shout out to Neil because that is exactly what I was looking for and I don't have enough reputation to reply or upvote..

Believe it or not paypal still doesn't make it easy to do subscription testing with ipn files :/

So, just because I didn't see it on here and the OP kind of sounded like they were under the impression to only expect two possible responses from papal --

if anyone else is having issues, here are some other txn_type that hit my ipn while doing testing:

//when paypal subscription profile is created for the subscriber
subscr_signup 

//payment made for a given billing cycle
subscr_payment 

//when subscription fails
subscr_failed 

//user cancels subscription - not
subscr_cancel 

//end of term - paypal is "done" with that subscriber 
subscr_eot 

//why I was looking for this thread to begin with lol
recurring_payment_suspended_due_to_max_failed_payment

that last one hit my ipn this morning against every last one of my test subscribers. when I was looking up what that meant, I found that the following are also possible to get:

recurring_payment_profile_created

recurring_payment_profile_cancel

recurring_payment_profile_modify

recurring_payment

recurring_payment_skipped

recurring_payment_failed

I don't know what I did to get that because subscriptions and recurring payments are technically different in PayPal's eyes (subscriptions can possibly never terminate but recurring payments have a cap on the total payments someone can make for any "subscription") but their documentation isn't always straight forward, either, so I dunno. That I'm still working on figuring out as this was a subscription button generated by a sandbox merchant account but whatever.

Happy headaches :)

UPDATE: I figured out my problem just now - so just so it sounds like I know what I'm doing I'll explain...

I think paypal's subscription sandbox environment is slowly dying. I noticed the other day when I'm messing around in sandbox.paypal.com that I get "Fatal Failure" a lot of times. Refreshing the page seems to correct this most times, although sometimes i have to refresh a few times for the screen to come back.

I am getting the same response from them hitting my IPN file, which explains why every subscription I had got suspended today. Thanks to Neil I was able to resend the IPN response and I captured it into a text file (lol) and then I hit the ipn file reading in the response and throw it back at paypal (its really more complicated than that I'm just making it sound easy).

In any case by refreshing the page I can initiate the paypal handshake more or less on demand and when I do, it's 50/50 - sometimes I get VERIFIED, and sometimes I get Fatal Failure - just like when I try to do much of anything in their sandbox site (Fatal Failure).

Below is an example of part of a failed response I get from them... I get a 200 so I believe hitting their server isn't the issue with connectivity, but I am starting to see a pattern with "Fatal Failure" here and this points to more their end than mine

HTTP/1.1 200 OK 
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 2015 02:41:00 GMT 
Server: Apache 

Fatal Failure