Little Bit of Code

I had some trouble testing Authorize.net with the excellent rails credit card processing gem ActiveMerchant. The documentation calls for the code ActiveMerchant::Billing::Base.mode = :test, however, this resulted in the following error: The merchant login ID or password is invalid or the account is inactive.

To solve the problem, a key test with the String value true can be added to the gateway initialization hash, as follows:

if ENV['RAILS_ENV'] != 'production'
  gateway = ActiveMerchant::Billing::Base.gateway(:authorize_net).new(
    :login => "login",
    :password => "transkey", :test => 'true')
else
  gateway = ActiveMerchant::Billing::Base.gateway(:authorize_net).new(
    :login => "login",
    :password => "transkey")
end

Using this code, the account is placed into test mode when not run in production mode.