How a State Machine Using AASM Fixed Recurring Payment Failures in Rails
A developer working on a Rails platform that handled recurring renewal payments across several regions found that payment statuses were being updated from controllers, background jobs, and webhook handlers without any shared rules. This allowed impossible transitions, such as moving from failed straight to paid, and let out-of-order or duplicate provider events overwrite newer state. The fix was to model the payment lifecycle as an explicit state machine using the AASM gem, so invalid transitions become visible, loggable errors. The approach was further hardened with row-level locking during transitions, idempotent webhook handling backed by a unique database constraint, and keeping side effects like emails out of the transition itself.
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