Razorpay signature never verifies: the HMAC key and message are swapped

TL;DR

Context: Stack Overflow #56573028 (answer score 15): A Node.js developer's Razorpay payment signature verification kept failing because the HMAC arguments were swapped: they passed razorpayorderid + "|" + razorpaypaymentid as the HMAC key and the key secret as the message.

Steps

1. When Razorpay signature verification fails on every payment, check that you have not swapped the HMAC key and message. The secret is the key; the string orderid + "|" + paymentid is what gets signed. Swapping them produces a valid-looking hex digest that never matches, which looks exactly like a Razorpay-side problem but is a two-line bug in your code.

When to use

You are seeing this: When Razorpay signature verification fails on every payment, check that you have not swapped the HMAC key and message. Use this skill when you run into "Razorpay signature never verifies: the HMAC key and message are swapped".

When not to use

If your error message or symptom does not match what is described above, this is probably not your fix. Search for your exact error text instead of forcing this one to fit.

Versions

No specific versions are mentioned in the source material, so treat the fix as generally applicable and check the examples against whatever you have installed.

Why this happens

The original report does not dig into a root cause. It documents the symptom and the fix that resolved it.

Source: Stack Overflow #56573028 (answer score 15): A Node.js developer's Razorpay payment signature verification kept failing because the HMAC arguments were swapped: they passed razorpayorderid + "|" + razorpaypaymentid as the HMAC key and the key secret as the message. The correct construction is createHmac('sha256', RAZORPAYKEYSECRET) with the order id, a pipe, and the payment id as the signed message.

Verified resolution: When Razorpay signature verification fails on every payment, check that you have not swapped the HMAC key and message. The secret is the key; the string orderid + "|" + paymentid is what gets signed. Swapping them produces a valid-looking hex digest that never matches, which looks exactly like a Razorpay-side problem but is a two-line bug in your code.

Source URL: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56573028