Hello,
Recently I decided to publish a free app on Shopify.
My plan was to start with some of the tutorials for Rails, code the business logic and then publish the app.
- Setup for the application
There were big problems with setup the application. I saw on twitch that also the Shopify developers struggle to activate an app - that is not normal!
I expect to have a smooth flow and path to be easy and to enjoy working with Shopify. Shopify for me was a good example of a Rails application and great community.
I found probably two official tutorials that didn’t work …or I didn’t understand how to make them work. Finally, I found some example on github which worked, so I moved my code there and continued from there…
There was big pain of understanding the part with ngok, the shopify cli (old/'new version) why there are not working commands (for populating demo stores).
- Development
The development well. The API was well described and I found everything needed. There were some misunderstandings about how to activate the API in the Rails console without using the Shopify console but that’s not a problem because I found answers in the community.
There was no clue what CSS and framework to use if I don’t use the React components and wanted to do server rendering. My expectation is for Shopify to provide the CSS framework for the admin panel so that I can provide the same UI experience by using pure CSS without React. I went with homemade CSS.
- Publishing
My app does not follow the workflow for OAuth. I have used the tutorials from Shopify and the example apps.
I don’t have time to integrate and find solutions for Shopify OAuth. I still don’t know why the uninstall hook is not triggering - sometimes it triggers sometimes not. I have no magic beans in my pocket, I have no answers to my questions in the forums and it looks that the other people don’t have a problem so I assume I am doing something wrong.
I would like Shopify to do their job and provide 1 tutorial or one setup procedure that works. It could be just one youtube video showing the setup of Rails app for 20min.
I have published the application as a custom app.
Some strange things
On to submit the application I provided phones, but my application was returned because I didn’t provide phones - it happens that I should put the phones in my account - this took a few days.
I saw that the Rails App is making every 2sec requests to refresh token - that is not normal.
On editing an application on the bottom there is only one button “delete app” - this is frustrating. At the end of the form should be “SAVE” not the “Delete all your work” button.
I hope someone will read this and improve the Rails documentation so that I can just do one command then do my business logic.