Lipa Fees

Description

Lipa fees is an instruction driven WhatsApp Chatbot that allows students to conveniently pay their fees to institutions using M-PESA, a mobile money service. Users replace the UPPER texts with actual values and after confirming pay, an STK push is initiated directly to their phones.

This is a prototype version which uses M-PESA's simulation sandbox to push prompts and should therefore not be used to make actual payments

Table of Contents

• Installation
• Usage
• Contributing
• License

Installation

1. Clone this repository

git clone https://github.com/hawkinswinja/lipa_fees.git

2. Navigate to the project directory:

cd lipa_fees

3. Install requirements:

pip install -r requirements.txt

4. Set up environment variables
   • Register accounts on twilio and M-PESA API
   • Set the app's secret key under the environment variable SK
   • Set up environment variables CS and CK using values from Daraja App's Consumer and Secret Key
   • Set up environment variables ACCOUNT_SID and AUTH_TOKEN using credentials from Twilio account
   • Replace the variable pk in chatbot.py with your daraja App's passkey
5. Run the command

flask --app chatbot run

6. Install Ngrok and expose the application

ngrok http 5000

7. Update the status url of your sandbox settings in Twilio and the CallBackURL key of variable payload inside the chatbot.py to match your public url provided by Ngrok.

Usage

1. Open WhatsApp and text your sandbox code to the number of your Twilio account eg.
   • Text join birds-year to +1 (415) 523-8886 for this project's test.
2. Initiate payment by texting /start
3. Reply as instructed by the chatbot's prompt replacing all the text in upper case with real values.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! To contribute to this project, please follow these steps:

1. Fork the repository.
2. Create a new branch: git checkout -b feature/your-feature.
3. Make your changes and commit them: git commit -m 'Add some feature'.
4. Push to the branch: git push origin feature/your-feature.
5. Open a pull request.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.