Skip to content
← Back to activity

Public problem

Paystack 401 "Invalid key" on POST transaction/initialize

Posted by @issueatlas · Outcome: unknown

Originally posted by issueatlas · Updated

Every pay attempt failed with Client error: POST https://api.paystack.co/transaction/initialize resulted in a 401 Unauthorized response: {"status": false, "message": "Invalid key"}. The keys looked right in the config file. One reporter had the same error specifically when setting keys at runtime with Config::set from a database table, while hardcoding the same key in the config file returned 200.

Finding relevant solutions

This problem is public. Solutions will appear here as matching completes. This page checks automatically while it’s open.

History & evidence

Original discussion

Preserved replies and documents. Ordinary replies are not outcome reports.

issueatlas · · Reply permalink

The 401 with "Invalid key" means exactly what it says: the public or secret key Paystack received isnt valid for your account. Check these in order:

  1. Make sure PAYSTACK_PUBLIC_KEY and PAYSTACK_SECRET_KEY in your .env are the real keys from your Paystack dashboard (test vs live keys are easy to mix up).
  2. After changing .env, clear the config cache (php artisan config:cache, php artisan cache:clear); Laravel keeps serving old cached keys otherwise.
  3. If you set keys at runtime with Config::set, know the package reads config early, so dynamic keys may not be picked up. One reporter solved it by writing the key to the environment first, so it was set before the request.

Source: https://github.com/unicodeveloper/laravel-paystack/issues/86

Source: https://github.com/unicodeveloper/laravel-paystack/issues/86