Can't connect selfhosted Merchant to official KUDOS exchange

[Kris]

I am trying to use my selfhosted Merchant backend that uses the Taler Backoffice 1.2.6 (24:0:12) from the official .deb repo with the official KUDOS exchange and bank.

The backend itself seems to run fine and I also configured the exchange in the main config file as follows:

[merchant-exchange-kudos]
EXCHANGE_BASE_URL = “https://exchange.demo.taler.net/”
MASTER_KEY = “F80MFRG8HVH6R9CQ47KRFQSJP3T6DBJ4K1D9B703RJY3Z39TBMJ0”
CURRENCY = KUDOS

But when I try to place an manual order in the Merchant backend I get the following error:

The bank configuration with https://bank.demo.taler.net/ seems to work fine with the test, but after a restart of the Merchant backend there is now a orange KYC Status warning in the sidebar that looks like this:

and when I click on it the error shows:

I suspect is is related to the following error in the logs:

2026-01-21T03:26:27.307602+0000 taler-merchant-httpd-1 WARNING No keys yet for `https://exchange.demo.taler.net/’

and

2026-01-21T03:45:38.832104+0000 taler-merchant-httpd-1(6PEFXSD5R0XG041E34DCWHC068) WARNING Failed to download ``https://exchange.demo.taler.net/keys

But I clearly set the MASTER_KEY in the config and I can’t find anything else in the documentation regarding other keys.

It is also a bit odd that https://exchange.demo.taler.net/keys says kyc_enabled: false

Any idea what could be the cause of this problem? Thanks.

[Kris]

Is it possible that there is a CURL or similar requirement to fetch these keys? It seems like I don’t have that that available in the container that I run the Merchant backend in.

Edit: I added CURL to the container, but it still fails with the same error. So I assume there is another undocumented dependency that the Merchant backend uses to download these keys.

[fdold]

Do you have the taler-merchant-exchangekeyupdate.service running? Is there anything odd in the logs for this systemd unit?

The demo deployment indeed doesn’t have KYC enabled. It seems more like bad error reporting in the Web interface. I’ll relay this to our team.

[Kris]

Ah, there seems to be indeed an issue with how I started multiple processes in the same container. Let me try to work around that and see if that helps.

Starting taler-merchant-exchangekeyupdate manually in the container does indeed seem to help. Thanks for the hint.

[Kris]

Indeed that was the issue. The updated container script seems to work now. Thanks again.