Getting Started with Headless Shopify: Do We Need In-Depth Liquid Knowledge?

[ellie_maffio]

Hi everyone!

I'm opening this thread because my team and I are starting to approach the development and customization of Shopify themes. We are also very interested in delving into the development of headless shops. In this journey, we don't want to rush through any steps, but rather take the necessary time to acquire all the required knowledge.

For this reason, I would like to ask this question: to start delving into the development of headless solutions, is it strictly necessary to become very proficient in Liquid development? Or do you think a basic understanding is enough?

I would also be grateful if you could recommend some resources to further explore the development of a headless shop 🙂

Thank you all!

[Bwclovis]

Greetings. I too am getting started with headless Shopify (I have one shop), but have been doing headless sites and architecture for several years now and I think it's safe to say you don't need to know Luquid to dive into headless. 

At its root, headless is nothing more than APIs coming to your front end of choice which tends to be some flavor of Javascript (React being the main player for Shopify).

Shopify uses a framework called Hydrogen which is a framework called Remix under the hood. Another favorite, including mine, is Next.js. A good start may be looking at those as well as React itself.

Best of luck!

[ShopifyDevSup]

Hey @ellie_maffio, 

@Bwclovis has offered some great advice. I just wanted to add, since you're looking for resources, our getting started guides can walk you through the entire setup, with a very basic storefront. https://shopify.dev/docs/storefronts/headless/hydrogen/getting-started 

Hope that helps, 

- Kyle G.