Vendure

A headless GraphQL ecommerce framework built on Node.js with Nest & TypeScript, with a focus on developer productivity and ease of customization.

www.vendure.io

• Getting Started: Get Vendure up and running locally in a matter of minutes with a single command
• Live Demo
• Vendure Discord Join us on Discord for support and answers to your questions

Structure

This project is a monorepo managed with Lerna. Several npm packages are published from this repo, which can be found in the packages/ directory.

vendure/
├── docs/           # Documentation source
├── e2e-common/     # Shared config for package e2e tests
├── packages/       # Source for the Vendure server, admin-ui & plugin packages
├── scripts/
    ├── changelog/  # Scripts used to generate the changelog based on the git history
    ├── codegen/    # Scripts used to generate TypeScript code from the GraphQL APIs
    ├── docs/       # Scripts used to generate documentation markdown from the source

Development

The following instructions are for those who want to develop the Vendure core framework or plugins (e.g. if you intend to make a pull request). For instructions on how to build a project using Vendure, please see the Getting Started guide.

1. Install top-level dependencies

yarn

The root directory has a package.json which contains build-related dependencies for tasks including:

• Building & deploying the docs
• Generating TypeScript types from the GraphQL schema
• Linting, formatting & testing tasks to run on git commit & push

Note: When you do yarn for the first time, you will need to manually create the package folder under /packages/admin-ui.

2. Bootstrap the packages

yarn bootstrap

This runs the Lerna "bootstrap" command, which cross-links monorepo dependencies.

3. Build all packages

yarn build

Packages must be built (i.e. TypeScript compiled, admin ui app built, certain assets copied etc.) before being used.

Note that this can take a few minutes.

4. Set up the server

The server requires an SQL database to be available. The simplest option is to use SQLite, but if you have Docker available you can use the dev-server docker-compose file which will start up both MariaDB and Postgres as well as their GUI management tools.

Vendure uses TypeORM, and officially supports MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite, though other TypeORM-supported databases may work.

1. Configure the dev config, making sure the connection settings in the getDbConfig() function are correct for the database type you will be using.
2. Create the database using your DB admin tool of choice (e.g. phpMyAdmin if you are using the docker image suggested above). Name it according to the getDbConfig() settings. If you are using SQLite, you can skip this step.
3. Populate mock data:

    cd packages/dev-server
    DB=<mysql|postgres|sqlite> yarn populate

   If you do not specify the DB variable, it will default to "mysql".

5. Run the dev server

cd packages/dev-server
DB=<mysql|postgres|sqlite> yarn start

Or if you are in the root package

DB=<mysql|postgres|sqlite> yarn dev-server:start

If you do not specify the DB argument, it will default to "mysql".

Testing admin ui changes locally

If you are making changes to the admin ui, you need to start the admin ui independent from the dev-server:

1. cd packages/admin-ui
2. yarn start
3. Go to http://localhost:4200 and log in with "superadmin", "superadmin"

This will auto restart when you make changes to the admin ui. You don't need this step when you just use the admin ui just to test backend changes.

Testing your changes locally

This example shows how to test changes to the payments-plugin package locally, but it will also work for other packages.

1. Open 2 terminal windows:

• Terminal 1 for watching and compiling the changes of the package you are developing
• Terminal 2 for running the dev-server

# Terminal 1
cd packages/payments-plugin
yarn watch

⚠️ If you are developing changes for the corepackage, you also need to watch the common package:

# Terminal 1
# Root of the project
yarn watch:core-common

2. After the changes in your package are compiled you have to stop and restart the dev-server:

# Terminal 2
cd packages/dev-server
DB=sqlite yarn start

3. The dev-server will now have your local changes from the changed package.

ℹ️ Lerna links to the dist folder of the packages, so you don't need to rerun 'yarn bootstrap'

Code generation

graphql-code-generator is used to automatically create TypeScript interfaces for all GraphQL server operations and admin ui queries. These generated interfaces are used in both the admin ui and the server.

Running yarn codegen will generate the following files:

• packages/common/src/generated-types.ts: Types, Inputs & resolver args relating to the Admin API
• packages/common/src/generated-shop-types.ts: Types, Inputs & resolver args relating to the Shop API
• packages/admin-ui/src/lib/core/src/common/generated-types.ts: Types & operations relating to the admin-ui queries & mutations.
• packages/admin-ui/src/lib/core/src/common/introspection-result.ts: Used by the Apollo Client IntrospectionFragmentMatcher to correctly handle fragments in the Admin UI.
• Also generates types used in e2e tests in those packages which feature e2e tests (core, elasticsearch-plugin, asset-server-plugin etc).

Testing

Server Unit Tests

The core and several other packages have unit tests which are can be run all together by running yarn test from the root directory, or individually by running it from the package directory.

Unit tests are co-located with the files which they test, and have the suffix .spec.ts.

End-to-end Tests

Certain packages have e2e tests, which are located at /packages/<name>/e2e/. All e2e tests can be run by running yarn e2e from the root directory, or individually by running it from the package directory.

e2e tests use the @vendure/testing package. For details of how the setup works, see the Testing docs

When debugging e2e tests, set an environment variable E2E_DEBUG=true which will increase the global Jest timeout and allow you to step through the e2e tests without the tests automatically failing due to timeout.

Release Process

All packages in this repo are released at every version change (using Lerna's fixed mode). This simplifies both the development (tracking multiple disparate versions is tough) and also the developer experience for users of the framework (it is simple to see that all packages are up-to-date and compatible).

To make a release:

1. yarn publish-release

It will run lerna publish which will prompt for which version to update to. Although we are using conventional commits, the version is not automatically being calculated from the commit messages. Therefore the next version should be manually selected.

Next it will build all packages to ensure the distributed files are up to date.

Finally the command will create changelog entries for this release.

2. git push origin master --follow-tags

The reason we do not rely on Lerna to push the release to Git is that this repo has a lengthy pre-push hook which runs all tests and builds the admin ui. This long wait then invalidates the npm OTP and the publish will fail. So the solution is to publish first and then push.

License

MIT