A Shopify App development setup that will save you so much time!

Shopify app development can be a pain. Lot of people getting started knows what I am talking about. Even as an ex-Shopify, I still got trouble setting up an effective development environment. But after some work, I think I finally got something working well. I wanted to share it with the community. I will even share with you a one line deploy command at the end!

Backend: Rails

There is only two viable options as a Shopify App backend: NodeJS or Rails. You can use other backend platforms, but you will have to write the Shop Authentification layer yourself. Picking one of the two above will save you time.

I choose to use Rails. This is a great choice because Shopify own backend is written in Rails. This might not be obvious, but it makes your life way easier because a lot of little details in the Rails library are better due to Shopify employees’ expertise in Ruby and Rails. Choose Rails to save time unless you are very experimented with NodeJS.

I’ll be using Rails 6.0 in this post.

Frontend: React

You only have one real option here: React. This is because Polaris (the mandatory UI framework of Shopify) is only available in React. You can use their HTML/CSS version, but you will have difficulty to maintain your code in the long run.

The only real issue here is that using React forces you to adopt a Single Page Application (SPA)…