This article is for anyone who is trying to handle credit card transactions on-line using Ruby on Rails. 1 If you are like me, the fact that Ruby on Rails is still in its infancy has probably left you pounding your head against the wall while looking for quick solutions to old problems like e-commerce. More than likely, the source of your headaches (aside from the pounding) is the lack of documentation, even with popular plugins. This article is the sum of hours of scouring the Internet trying to piece together everything about Active Merchant, SSL, Apache, et al., and make them all play nicely in a Ruby on Rails application.

For the entirety of this article, I will assume you have a bank merchant account and an Authorize.net merchant account. 2 (Even if you don't, the article should help if you plan on using the Active Merchant payment abstraction library plugin, which is what I use for my transactions.) Authorize.net will serve as an on-line third party to review our credit card transactions and issue an approval/rejection. It will then be up to our code to handle the response. Simple enough? Let's get to work.