Openship Is a Shopify App for Drop Shipping and Order Fulfillment

In this episode of Running in Production, Junaid Kabani goes over how he built and deploys Openship which is a Shopify app that was written in Koa. The front-end uses React.

We covered a lot of ground in this episode, such as how Prisma, Apollo, Next.js and React all come together to build an app that uses Shopify’s API. There’s also quite a lot of details on the value of testing and how CI helps keep open source projects well tested.

Topics Include

• 1:02 – Junaid was running his own online store before making this app
• 1:38 – Zapier and Google Sheets worked for a while but it wasn’t sustainable
• 2:12 – Shopify’s API has extensive documentation
• 2:47 – Drop shipping is a great way to test items before holding your own inventory
• 4:24 – A lot of these services are trying to compete with Amazon’s fulfillment service
• 4:37 – Openship lets you transition from drop shipping to having your own inventory
• 5:24 – Drop shipping and testing items is almost like pre-selling an app idea
• 5:28 – Junaid hired a contractor early on to help with anything he gets stuck on
• 5:41 – He didn’t have much luck with StackOverflow early on (I’m not surprised!)
• 6:19 – He paid about $500 to $1,000 while developing his project and it was worth it
• 7:03 – Motivation for using Koa and Node
• 8:13 – Shopify has official packages for Koa
• 8:41 – Shopify lets you write custom apps in a lot of different web frameworks
• 9:26 – There’s an Apollo server and a React front-end with Prisma handling the data layer
• 9:53 – The back-end and front-end are in their own separate git repos
• 10:11 – Trade offs between working with a mono repo and multi-repo set up
• 11:32 – Going into a bit more details about the back-end / front-end set up
• 12:36 – Websockets might be used later when an upcoming messaging system is in place
• 12:57 – The work flow for adding Openship to your Shopify app
• 13:10 – Dealing with returns is cumbersome with drop shipping
• 15:24 – High level recap of the work flow as a shop owner
• 15:42 – End customers who purchase items see the usual Shopify checkout work flow
• 16:39 – The marketplace aspect of Openship is very powerful and it’s competitively priced
• 18:25 – Private labeling is another feature that’s coming soon
• 18:53 – The marketplace is a separate Shopify shop that uses Shopify’s API
• 19:06 – The Shopify app is hosted on DigitalOcean using CapRover (self hosted PaaS)
• 20:04 – Prisma runs on its own server which contains the MySQL database
• 20:12 – The 2nd server hosts the back-end (web server) and front-end (React app)
• 20:32 – It was all hosted on 1 server initially but it kept crashing
• 21:19 – Prisma is an open source CMS for a bunch of popular databases
• 22:54 – You typically use tools like Apollo to limit access to Prisma
• 23:19 – The Apollo server prevents anyone from accessing your database
• 23:50 – What exactly is the Apollo server? It’s a GraphQL implementation
• 24:34 – Breaking down the layers of your database, Prisma, Apollo and your client
• 26:22 – Apollo helps deal with multi-tenancy concerns by letting you isolate users
• 27:06 – Openship doesn’t store any confidential info in their own database
• 27:55 – Access control between Shopify and Openship is handled with OAuth
• 28:34 – CapRover handles setting up a reverse proxy and setting up HTTPS
• 29:31 – Openship isn’t running in Docker but Prisma provided its own Dockerfile
• 30:35 – CapRover has a bunch of 1 click installers, one of which is for Sentry
• 30:54 – CapRover is only being used in production
• 31:42 – Postmark is being used to send transactional emails (free tier)
• 32:08 – Junaid pays about $10 to $20 a month for Zapier
• 32:33 – Zapier helps you glue together APIs from external services
• 34:28 – CapRover uses Let’s Encrypt under the hood for managing SSL certificates
• 34:37 – CapRover has a 1 click app on DigitalOcean so it’s easy to install
• 35:36 – DigitalOcean’s monitoring / alerts aren’t being used at the moment
• 35:59 – On the horizon Junaid may switch to using now.sh
• 36:20 – Should you go Serverless or stick with a more traditional app?
• 37:12 – Dealing with secrets and sensitive values when using CapRover
• 37:58 – The full break down of how code gets from development to production
• 38:34 – Running automated tests and the value of CI / CD
• 40:04 – Get a test suite up and running and then worry about CI
• 40:52 – TDD vs writing tests after you write your implementation
• 41:40 – Having a test suite really helps you refactor and improve your code later on
• 42:06 – The difference between testing locally vs using a continuous integration server
• 44:27 – The benefits of CI in an open source project for testing pull requests
• 45:14 – There’s no database backups in place because Shopify is the source of truth
• 45:58 – No health check services are being used but Junaid is using Openship all the time
• 46:42 – Uptime Robot’s free tier is very generous and it pings your site every 5min
• 47:53 – Best tips? Jump into the code, there’s a lot to take in but it’s manageable
• 48:25 – A bad decision beats indecision because you can fix bad decisions
• 49:08 – Junaid got this far with 1 year’s worth of experience which is very impressive
• 52:00 – Check out openship.org and its open source repo on GitHub

Links