Is our commerce project development setup on Gitlab correct?

Technical Q&A
1

Hi!

Our team is new to Shopify. We’re doing a commerce project for a client and I wonder if we’re on the right track with how we’ve set things up so far. The overall question is basically: “is this how you guys would do it?”. Any thoughts or hints are more than welcome!

This is where we are right now:

  • We got our real store project (not dev-store), with an Online Store, and a private app in place.

  • The private app code lives in a Gitlab repo.

  • The theme-code currently also lives in this private app.

  • In the Online Store we got a live production theme, a staging theme, and personal development themes for each developer(!).

  • The CD/CI-idea here is that: 1) each developer should only push changes to his/her development theme-instance (either with themekit’s watch-command or by pushing to his/her dev-branch),

  1. pushing/merging updates into the master-branch updates the staging theme, 3) and tags on the master-branch updates the live production theme
  • in private app: /theme/config.yml (variables live locally in Library/Application Support/Shopify/variables):
development:
  password: ${SHOPIFY_API_PASSWORD}
  theme_id: ${DEVELOPMENT_THEME_ID}
  store: ${SHOPIFY_STORE}.myshopify.com

staging:
  password: ${SHOPIFY_API_PASSWORD}
  theme_id: ${STAGING_THEME_ID}
  store: ${SHOPIFY_STORE}.myshopify.com

production:
  password: ${SHOPIFY_API_PASSWORD}
  theme_id: ${PRODUCTION_THEME_ID}
  store: ${SHOPIFY_STORE}.myshopify.com
  • in private app: /theme/.gitlab-ci.yml (for deploying with Themekit on push/tags on master branch)
image: python:2

stages:
  - staging
  - production

staging:
  image: python:2
  stage: staging
  script:
    - curl -s https://shopify.github.io/themekit/scripts/install.py | python
    - theme deploy -e=staging
  only:
    - master

production:
  image: python:2
  stage: production
  script:
    - curl -s https://shopify.github.io/themekit/scripts/install.py | python
    - theme deploy -e=production
  only:
    - tags

  • The private app will eventually also do a lot of logical operations, e.g. communicating with external API:s and read/write customer data etc. This makes us wonder if we should split up theme and logic into separate repos, or at least use some lerna/workspace structure.

  • We followed parts of this guide to set up things initially.

So… do you guys have a similar or different approach? Any aspects we might have forgotten/should consider? Sorry for a very broad question, but we’re grateful for any insights on this!