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shopify-sinatra-app

"A classy shopify app"

shopify-sinatra-app is lightweight extension for building Shopify apps using Sinatra. It comes with the Shopify API gem for interacting with the Shopify API and uses the Shopify omniauth gem to handle authentication via Oauth (other auth methods are not supported). The framework itself provides a handful of helper methods to make creating your app as easy as possible. The framework was designed with deployment to Heroku in mind and following the instructions below I've been able to create a new application from scratch, deploy it to Heroku and install on my live test shop in less than 5 minutes.

ARCHIVED: This minimalist framework worked great from when it was first released in 2014 through to around 2023 when functionality started to degrade due to upstream changes by Shopify and web standards. In 2024 I finished shutting down my application which used this framework and archived the repo. I would recommend using the official ShopifyApp engine by Shopify.

Getting Started

Install the gem:

gem install shopify-sinatra-app

or build from source

gem build shopify-sinatra-app.gemspec
gem install shopify-sinatra-app-X.X.X.gem

To create a new app use the generator:

shopify-sinatra-app-generator new <your new app name>

This will create a new skeleton shopify-sinatra-app. The generator will create several default files for you rather than having them bundled in the sinatra extension - its worthwhile to read this section to understand what each of these files is for.

config/database.yml --> The database config for active record. Initially this is setup to use sqlite3 for development and testing which you may want to change to mimic your production database.

.gitignore --> tells git which files to ignore, namely .env you may find more things you want to add to this file.

.env --> a hidden file not tracked by source control for storing credentials etc. to be set as environment variables

config.ru --> Rackup file - describes how to run a rack based app

Gemfile --> manages the dependencies of the app

src/app.rb --> This file is the skeleton app file. More details on how to use the methods provided by this extension are given in the following section. There are more comments inside this file explaining the skeleton app.

Procfile --> Specific for deploying to Heroku, this file tells heroku how to run the app

Rakefile --> includes some helper methods etc for running and managing the app. Standard for ruby based projects

views/layouts/appliction.erb --> This is the layout file that all templates will use unless otherwise specified.

views/* --> The other views used by the app. You'll probably make a lot of changes to home.erb and install.erb to customize the experience for your app

test/* --> Test files, fixtures and helpers for testing your app.

Setting the app to use your Shopify API credentials

You'll need to create a Shopify Partner Account and a new application. You can make an account here and see this tutorial for creating a new application. The requires 2 redirects configured:

• the default redirect_uri from omniauth <your domain>/auth/shopify/callback
• and <your domain>/login

After creating your new application you need to edit the .env file and add the following lines:

SHOPIFY_API_KEY=<your api key>
SHOPIFY_SHARED_SECRET=<your shared secret>
SECRET=<generate a random string to encrypt credentials with>

If your app has any other secret credentials you should add them to this file.

Shopify::Methods

shopify_session - The main method of the framework, most of your routes will use this method to acquire a valid shopify session and then perform api calls to Shopfiy. The method activates a Shopify API session for you and accepts a block inside of which you can use the ShopifyAPI. Here is an example endpoint that displays products:

get '/products.json' do
  shopify_session do |shop_name|
    products = ShopifyAPI::Product.all(limit: 5)
    products.to_json
  end
end

shopify_webhook - This method defines a post endpoint that receives a webhook from Shopify. Webhooks are a great way to keep your app in sync with a shop's data without polling. You can read more about webhooks here. This method also takes a block and yields the shop_name and webhook_body as a hash (note only works for json webhooks, don't use xml). Here is an example that listens to an order creation webhook:

shopify_webhook('/order.json') do |shop_name, webhook_data|
  # do something with the data
end

Note this method does not active a Shopify session by default but the current_shop* methods still work. It is not advised but if you want to handle the webhook in a web request you will need to activate the ShopifyAPI session manually:

shop = Shop.find_by(name: current_shop_name)
api_session = ShopifyAPI::Session.new(shop.name, shop.token)
ShopifyAPI::Base.activate_session(api_session)

It's impossible to control the flow of webhooks to your app from Shopify especially if a larger store installs your app or if a shop has a flash sale. To prevent your app from getting overloaded with webhook requests it is best practise to process webhooks in a background queue and return a 200 to Shopify immediately. Ruby has several good background job frameworks that work with Sinatra including Sidekiq and Resque.

after_shopify_auth - This is a private method provided with the framework that gets called whenever the app is authorized. You should fill this method in with anything you need to initialize, for example webhooks and services on Shopify or any other database models you have created specific to a shop. Note that this method will be called anytime the auth flow is completed so this method should be idempotent (running it twice has the same effect as running it once).

shopify-sinatra-app includes sinatra/activerecord for creating models that can be persisted in the database. You might want to read more about sinatra/activerecord and the methods it makes available to you: https://github.com/janko-m/sinatra-activerecord

Developing

The app needs to be accessible on the internet in order to receive webhooks so you'll need to use a real domain or a forwarding service like ngrok. Set your application url in the Shopify Partner area to your forwarded url and set the redirect_uri to your forwarded url + /auth/shopify/callback which will allow you to install your app on a live shop while running it locally.

To run the app locally we use overmind a tool for running multiple process and setting our credentials as environment variables. To run the application run:

overmind start

To connect to a single process to use a debugger/break point use overmind connect <process>

To debug your app add require 'byebug' at the top and then add byebug to your code where you would like to drop into an interactive session. You may also want to try out Pry.

Testing

Some basic tests are included in the generated app. To run them simply run:

bundle exec rake test:prepare
bundle exec rake test

test:prepare will initialize your testing database using the seeds.rb file. If you have added additional models you can add them here.

Checkout the contents of the app_test.rb file and the test_helper.rb and modify them as you add functionality to your app. You can also check the tests of other apps using this framework to see more about how to write tests for your own app.

Apps using this framework

• shopify-fulfillment-integration
• shopify-tax-receipts
• Add yours!

Contributing

PRs welcome!

Note - this framework does have tests! They are the same tests that get generated for new apps by the generator. You can run them with ./test.sh