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Shopify Application Development
Shopify Application Development

Shopify Application Development: Build highly effective Shopify apps using the powerful Ruby on Rails framework

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Shopify Application Development

Chapter 2. Setting Up

The web application that we'll be building throughout the course of the book will be written in Ruby using the open source Rails framework. To quote http://rubyonrails.org:

"Ruby on Rails® is an open-source web framework that's optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity. It lets you write beautiful code by favoring convention over configuration."

I couldn't agree more. I find Rails fun to use and the development process to be very intuitive. The community is very active and there are tons of free resources online. It's also worth mentioning that Shopify is written in Rails and many popular Ruby libraries such as Active Merchant and Liquid are extractions of the Shopify source code.

Tip

Although the simplicity of Rails makes it an ideal tool for building our application, we could have just as easily used any web framework, such as ASP.NET, PHP, or Django and achieved a similar result. Remember, the end goal is to output HTML/CSS and JavaScript to the...

Choosing a development tool


Programmers are as passionate about the tools they use to write code as they are about which language the code is written in. There is typically a trade-off between speed and ease of use, in that the tools that are the fastest tend to require memorization of keystrokes and jargon; whereas the ones that are easier to use sacrifice efficiency for a more intuitive user experience.

There are several options available when developing Rails applications. A couple of popular simpler editors are Sublime Text (http://www.sublimetext.com) and TextMate (http://macromates.com). A few popular rich editors are RubyMine (http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby), Aptana (http://www.aptana.com), and Visual Studio with Ruby in Steel (http://sapphiresteel.com).

I've tried them all, and personally tend to oscillate between RubyMine and Sublime Text, depending on the project. If I'll be doing a lot of visual debugging, I'll use RubyMine. But for most projects, I find the speed and intuitive features...

Setting up our development environment


Before we can build our app, we need to set up our local development environment so that we can commit code and deploy to Heroku.

Installing a Ruby management tool

Given the variety of ways in which Ruby can be installed, I would suggest using a Ruby / Gem management tool to handle it for you. The following are a few worth noting:

Even if this is your only Ruby on Rails app, it's good practice to isolate applications from each other to avoid version conflicts or inadvertent software updates on. RVM allows you to not only install and manage multiple versions of Ruby on the same system, but also create gemsets which are containers for an application's gems. Gems are Ruby libraries that can be used to add common functionality to your app...

Installing Rails


For the purposes of this book, I am going to explicitly specify the version of Rails we want to use rather than just grabbing the latest stable version. I am doing this to ensure that the code examples work correctly several months from now. One catch when using the latest version of Rails is that the gems you want to use might not have been updated yet by their authors. This can lead to bugs being introduced that might not have an easy solution. I tend to lag one version behind (although I do keep an eye out for critical security patches) to ensure that I can build stable apps for my clients. The following command can be used to install Rails 4.0.3:

gem install rails -v 4.0.3 --no-ri --no-rdoc

Generating a Rails app

Rails comes with many helpful scripts, including one to generate a "vanilla" Rails application as follows:

rails new .

The preceding command will create the app in the current directory and automatically install the required gems. At this point, we can start...

Installing Twitter Bootstrap


The official website is http://getbootstrap.com and it describes Bootstrap as:

"The most popular front-end framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web."

What this means is that we can use Bootstrap to easily allow our web pages to scale based on the device being used. We no longer have to worry about creating separate view files for phones, tablets, and browsers. The scaling is automatically handled using CSS and JavaScript. Bootstrap also includes helpful CSS styles for making buttons stand out, formatting error messages correctly, and a myriad of other common tasks.

Now, it's time to install Bootstrap using some helpful Gems. Add the following lines below the line gem 'sass-rails', '~> 4.0.0' in your Gemfile::

gem "execjs"
gem "twitter-bootstrap-rails"
gem "bootstrap-sass"

Tip

Downloading the example code

You can download the example code files for all Packt books you have purchased from your account at http://www.packtpub.com. If you...

Setting up source control


At this point, it's a good idea to add our code to a hosted source control. This serves two purposes: the first is that it gives us a record of incremental changes made to each code file, and also acts as an off-site backup in case our development machine gets damaged or has a hard drive failure.

We'll be using Git (http://git-scm.com) as our Source Control Management (SCM) tool. If you don't have Git installed on your system, please follow the relevant installation instructions on the site. Additionally, we're going to use GitHub (http://github.com) as our off-site backup. There are other popular alternatives such as Bitbucket (http://bitbucket.org) or Unfuddle (http://unfuddle.com) that work just as well.

The workflow may vary depending on which service you use, but in general setting up a new repository involves the following steps:

  1. Create a repository on the hosted service of your choice.

  2. Initialize a new local repository using the following command:

    git init.
    
  3. Add...

Deploying to Heroku


Heroku (http://heroku.com) is a polyglot Platform as a Service (PaaS) that allows scalable hosting of websites written in several popular languages, including Ruby, Python, and Java. Deployment is as simple as installing the Heroku toolbelt and running a few commands. Heroku keeps a copy of our code on its own Git server and deploys the latest version when we do a push.

Sign up for Heroku and then head over to https://toolbelt.heroku.com and follow the installation instructions for your OS.

Tip

If you use Apache Subversion (SVN) or Concurrent Versions System (CVS) instead of Git, please note that you'll need to also use Git as it is required for deployment to Heroku: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/git#using-subversion-or-other-revision-control-systems.

We need to perform the following steps while using Heroku:

  1. To use Rails 4.0.3 with Heroku, we need to add the rails_12factor gem to the Gemfile so that we can precompile our assets.

    By default, Rails compiles the JavaScript...

Summary


In this chapter, we covered a brief overview of the Ruby on Rails platform, looked at different coding tools, got our development environment set up, and started building our application. We decided to use the Twitter Bootstrap framework to make our views responsive and reduce our frontend coding time. Finally, we checked everything into source control and deployed it to Heroku, which is a scalable cloud service that makes hosting Rails sites a breeze.

We now have a functioning website that we can expand to create our contest application. We'll be developing using an iterative approach, with regular commits to source control and deployments to Heroku to keep our production environment up to date.

In the next chapter, we will start with a high-level overview of the application, build the core business logic, and connect it privately to a Shopify test store.

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What you will learn

  • Create your own multitenant app using Ruby on Rails and deploy it to Heroku
  • Use RSpec and FactoryGirl for TDD
  • Ensure functional and targeted code using iterative development
  • Implement responsive design using Twitter Bootstrap
  • Request and process Shopify API access requests
  • Subscribe, verify, and respond to Shopify Webhooks
  • Publish your app to the Shopify App Store
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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : May 26, 2014
Length: 106 pages
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ISBN-13 : 9781783281053
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Publication date : May 26, 2014
Length: 106 pages
Edition :
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781783281053
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Table of Contents

5 Chapters
Getting Started with Shopify Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Setting Up Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Building a Private App Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Going Public Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
App Billing and Publication Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

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Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon 3.1
(9 Ratings)
5 star 33.3%
4 star 11.1%
3 star 11.1%
2 star 22.2%
1 star 22.2%
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Michael Larkin Mar 31, 2021
Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 1
Hello all,I'm mortified this book is still available for purchase, and very sorry the code shipped with the book didn't work. And for those of you that reached out via the publisher, I never received a single email.I did see the Github issues and I contacted the publisher numerous times in 2014 and 2015 asking them to fix their distribution and about how to make changes to the book, to no avail. I sent them updated code AND updated copy fixing the mistakes that were noted by others. I also agree that the meat of the book is missing, I was asked to write a beginner's book but I think the time would have been been spent assuming average Rails proficiency and having beginners use other (and plentiful) resources for that.I've asked for this book to be pulled over the years as it is now largely out of date and I'd be highly surprised if the code works with the Shopify API anymore given all the changes over the last 7 years, and the Ruby, Rails, and gem versions are far too old and would be difficult to run on most modern operating systems without the aid of Docker.Again, I am very sorry that the end result of the process was a mediocre book of marginal help.-- Mike Larkin
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Atomsk Jan 24, 2019
Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 1
Most of this doesn't even work as-is. Very outdated.
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Curt H. Aug 28, 2018
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Very detailed and Technical about using Shopify themes
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Jim Rothfork Mar 27, 2016
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
I've been working my way through and while the book is aimed more at beginners, it feels like it answers a need that's currently absent in the Shopify app development community: clear, concise examples & documentation about how to build an app using Ruby on Rails. I haven't found anything else like it and while I'm not a newbie to coding, web frameworks are something I've not had experience with and this book is filling in a lot of gaps in my knowledge.
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Pj Marshall Jun 30, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Really good if you know a bit already, I would much prefer a video tutorial though, I would buy it straight away !
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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