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@gray-adeyi/paystack-sdk

A paystack client SDK for the javascript runtime.

Why?

Searching the keyword paystack on npm's package registry returns 126 search results of paystack related projects from client packages to CLIs to framework related packages as at the time of the writing of this documentation, certainly the number will continue to go up because there will always be people who like to build stuff and people who think what is out there can be made better.

As a self taught developer with a python background, somewhere around 2016 when I was still very much a noob(I still am 😂, just cooler), I had a website i was building at the time in Django that needed payment integrations. I had limited knowledge of how things worked but I was able to get the feature to work in my spaghetti code with the help of a package called Pypaystack. It was magic for me because i had previously used requests in python which is similar to what axios and fetch api does but for the python ecosystem and I hated it because I was suffering from severe skill issue. That little abstraction of providing functions and methods that encapsulated all the implementations details needed to make an api call made all the difference for me as a beginner. It's safe to say that the author of that package was my hero as this became my go to package when I needed payment integration. Over the years, the project was no longer actively maintained and I experienced this issue where the package breaks my web apps when I tried to deploy it on Heroku (they still had a free tier then, good times 😮‍💨). Looking for the fix, I stumbled upon an open issue edwardpopoola/pypaystack#11 for the setback i was experiencing. It was as a result of how the project was published, it used a setup.py file which was an old but still valid method of publishing a python package. I was pushing for using a new tool at the time called poetry to simplify the publishing of the package (cool tools have come after like uv which i think is the coolest now) but was unable to get to the maintainer of the project after numerous attempts. I looked at other projects but i experienced issues like the other packages I tried out didn't work, there wasn't enough documentation on how to us them or the package had methods with camel case instead of snake case which is the norm in the python ecosystem. Sure PaystackClient.miscellaneous.getBanks looks cool in in a javascript code, I don't want to have to type that as a python developer, but this is not a story about python. I later had to fork Pypaystack, copied parts of it's code that were relevant to my needs and the job is done. I remember making a youtube video of this hack. It was a bad idea looking back because i had to copy the package for every new project i was working on but it worked.

I got my first professional developer role in July of 2022 which shaped and refined me. It was and still is overwhelming and requires me to push beyond my bounds. My typical self would shy away from the hard stuff which is not really a great trait for a developer. The nature of the job is problem solving and it's the most challenging part for me (my boss complains about it sometimes). I probably learnt how to avoid trouble so well that I need to unlearn it or I took quotes like "When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep." or "Don't try" by Charles Bukowski out of context. All days weren't entirely bad days, I've had my fair share of good days when I think to myself, this has to be the best job in the world. While working, I had to work with requests that I avoided and got pretty comfortable with it. It was then I went back to the source code for Pypaystack and how it worked made sense to me, so i decided to work on an official fork which led to the creation of Pypaystack2. There were a lot of similar packages as stated earlier but it was a leaning process for me, I made some mistakes, I tried some new things like building a CLI and adding async support, My profession job has once required me to write a little bit of GO (I didn't do amazingly well and had to work on another task but the language stuck, I definitely want to be decent in the language someday). So I thought to myself why not write a GO version which I did, then for dart (I still don't know flutter to this day 😭). Currently, my day job requires me to write a lot of javascript which lead to me challenging myself to create this project. I probably should stop writing client libraries and start working on those hard projects i've left incomplete.

Now that you have enough context as to what drives me, Here's my why.

  1. I do it because i love doing it. I love to see that something i built, works for someone else. The number of downloads and stars gives me chills like i have a place in this world. After a shitty day at work when my boss's expectations of me are high and I don't meetup those demands, I look to other things that I've done that are working as a motivation to try again, it's just a skill issue. And so that i don't start considering other career paths when the python bites me 😂, or start believing what Github Roast AI says about me
  2. I've been there before. What most of these projects have in common apart from all being paystack related tooling, is that i try to make sure that they are easy to use by providing detailed documentation because it's what I noticed most similar packages lacked. Nevertheless, the efforts of these other package authors should not be discredited as these endeavors are no easy feats

Features

  • Typescript support
  • Supports multiple Javascript runtime (Node, Bun, Deno)
  • Automatic case transformation of payload and response data

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License

This project is licensed under the terms of the MIT license.

Disclaimer

This project is an open-source client library for Paystack. It is not officially endorsed or affiliated with Paystack. All trademarks and company names belong to their respective owners.

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