Accept payments through GNU Taler, the free and open source, privacy-preserving payment system. Shoppers pay from a Taler wallet (browser extension or mobile app) using digital cash — the payer stays anonymous while every transaction remains taxable and auditable on the merchant side.
Status: Early development. The core payment integration against the GNU Taler merchant backend REST API is implemented (see the Roadmap) but has not yet seen wide production use — test against the demo backend before going live.
Unlike card gateways, Taler does not process cards or hold merchant funds. You run (or connect to) a Taler merchant backend that talks to an exchange. Maho creates an order in the backend, the customer's wallet claims and pays it, and Maho confirms the payment by polling the backend. Settlement to your bank account is handled by the exchange out of band.
- PHP >= 8.3
- Maho Commerce >= 26.5
- Access to a GNU Taler merchant backend instance and the API access token for one of its instances
composer require mahocommerce/module-talerClear the cache after installation:
./maho cache:flushNavigate to System > Configuration > Payment Methods > Taler in the Maho admin panel.
| Setting | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Enabled | Activate the payment method | No |
| Title | Payment method name shown at checkout | GNU Taler |
| Merchant Backend URL | Base URL of your Taler merchant backend (e.g. https://backend.demo.taler.net/) |
— |
| Instance | Merchant backend instance ID to bill against | — |
| API Access Token | Bearer token used to authenticate against the backend (Authorization: Bearer secret-token:...) |
— |
| Refund Window (days) | Refund window granted at order creation; after it passes the backend rejects refunds | 14 |
| Debug Logging | Log API requests and responses to var/log/taler.log |
No |
| Applicable Countries | All countries or specific countries only | All |
| Sort Order | Display position among payment methods | 100 |
| Pending / Paid order statuses | Order statuses applied while awaiting payment and after confirmation | pending_payment / processing |
All settings are store-scoped, so different store views can bill against different backends or instances.
GNU Taler runs a public demo environment you can use for testing without real money:
- Merchant backend: https://backend.demo.taler.net/
- Demo bank (to fund a wallet with
KUDOS): https://bank.demo.taler.net/ - Install the Taler wallet browser extension or mobile app to pay
Amounts are expressed in Taler's CURRENCY:VALUE.FRACTION format (e.g. EUR:10.00, KUDOS:5.00).
- Order placement — Customer selects Taler at checkout; the module calls
POST /private/orderson the merchant backend, which returns anorder_id(plus a claim token). - Payment — The customer is redirected to the backend-hosted payment page (
order_status_url), which shows the QR code /taler://pay link and triggers browser-extension wallets, then redirects back to the store once paid. - Confirmation — The module verifies
GET /private/orders/{order_id}server-side on return; a 5-minute cron safety net captures orders whose customers never returned and cancels expired ones. Confirmed payments are captured and invoiced. - Refunds — Full and partial refunds are issued from the Maho admin (online creditmemos) via
POST /private/orders/{order_id}/refund.
- Merchant backend order creation + pay URI / QR handoff
- Payment status polling and invoice capture
- Cron safety net for orders left pending
- Online refunds (full + partial) from admin
- Configurable pending / processing order statuses
- Multi-store backend/instance scoping
- Debug logging toggle (
var/log/taler.log) - Translations (en, it, da, nl, fi, fr, de, el, pl, pt, pt_BR, ro, es, sv)
This module ships with the standard Maho CI gates:
- Pest (unit tests) —
vendor/bin/pest --testsuite Unit - PHPStan (level 8) —
vendor/bin/phpstan analyze - Rector (dry-run) —
vendor/bin/rector -c .rector.php --dry-run - PHP CS Fixer (dry-run) —
vendor/bin/php-cs-fixer fix --dry-run - PHP / XML syntax checks — automatic on CI
Run composer install and you can execute any of the above locally before pushing.
The integration suite boots a real Maho application and exercises the API client against a live Taler merchant backend (order create/read/delete, refund and auth error mapping). On CI it runs against the public demo backend by default; set the TALER_BACKEND_URL, TALER_INSTANCE and TALER_API_TOKEN repository secrets to test against your own backend instead (use @root as the instance for the default instance at the backend root).
When taler-wallet-cli is available (on Linux: Taler's noble-testing apt channel, matching the demo deployment), the suite also runs real payments: a headless wallet withdraws KUDOS from the demo bank, pays the order, and the tests verify the paid status, cumulative partial refunds and the wallet collecting the refund. These paid-path tests skip automatically when the wallet CLI is missing or the backend currency is not KUDOS.
To run it locally, install Maho into this repo once (SQLite, no services needed) and opt in via the environment:
composer install
php maho install --license_agreement_accepted yes \
--locale en_US --timezone Europe/Rome --default_currency EUR \
--db_engine sqlite --db_name taler_test.sqlite \
--db_host localhost --db_user '' --db_pass '' \
--url 'http://taler.test/' \
--admin_lastname Test --admin_firstname Test \
--admin_email test@example.com \
--admin_username admin --admin_password 'AdminTest123456!'
TALER_INTEGRATION=1 vendor/bin/pest --testsuite IntegrationThe wallet side cannot run headlessly, so the paid/refund happy path remains a manual test (see Sandbox / demo).
This module is licensed under the Open Software License v3.0.