Local Testing

Hi @wordpresssites,

I understand you are working on a plugin that integrates with WooPayments and want to confirm whether local testing is possible, especially given the invalid_client error you are seeing. Happy to help clarify how this works and point you in the right direction so you can move forward with confidence.

WooPayments does not currently support full end to end testing on a purely local environment. This is because WooPayments relies on secure connections, OAuth credentials, and communication with WordPress.com and Stripe services, which require a publicly accessible site. The error you are encountering, where the client_id parameter is missing, usually appears when the site cannot complete the OAuth handshake with WooPayments services, which is expected in a local setup.

For development and testing, the recommended approach is to use a publicly accessible staging site instead of localhost. This allows WooPayments to generate and validate the required client credentials correctly. You can find more details on how WooPayments connections work and the environment requirements here: https://woocommerce.com/document/woopayments/testing-and-troubleshooting/.

If you are building an integration, you may also want to review the WooPayments developer documentation, which explains the authentication flow and supported environments in more detail: https://woocommerce.com/document/woocommerce-rest-api/.

Once you have a staging or test site set up and connected, you should be able to continue developing and validating your integration without running into the local OAuth limitations.

Let us know how it goes on a staging site, and feel free to share any follow up questions as you continue testing.