Call for new maintainers/collaborators

[simonwalsh]

We are looking for maintainers and contributors as Dynamo as a group will not be continuing active maintainance and features development for Shopify Pipeline (and it's scaffolder create-shopify-pipeline).

If you are interested in doing so, please comment here and I will get in touch.

We will keep this project in the Dynamo organization if/when/until we need to move it away so as not to break any projects depending on it.

Let's keep Shopify Pipeline alive!

[t-kelly]

Hey @simonwalsh -- I'm interested in integrating the work you've done into the shopify/slate project. What you and @nddery have created in this repo is mostly in the same direction we want to take Slate. Shopify-Pipeline would make an excellent starting point to expand upon and make even better for Slate v1.0!

[nddery]

Just wanted to leave a note here -- @simonwalsh and I met with @t-kelly a couple of days ago to discuss this further and we’ve all agreed this would be the best path forward for both projects. @t-kelly has already begun work in this direction, so stay tuned for what's next.

@t-kelly, as we’ve said before, if there’s anything we can help with please let us know, we’re glad to help.

[lastobelus]

@simonwalsh @t-kelly After using shopify-pipeline heavily for 2 months with collaborators on a largish shopify-plus customer's project, I'm not sure that it's the right path forward. For point of reference, I've also worked with a hand-rolled gulp based build system in the past. And, I'm probably going to be replacing shopify-pipeline with another gulp-based build system, handrolled to work on the shopify-pipeline directory structure so that I don't have to move files around. Again.

Points of Pain

1. Build system in a separate package is a big productivity killer. Some things you can tweak/add in the user configs, but when you have to tweak shopify-pipeline, development is very slow. To switch to a local copy, you have to change your project package.json to point to it and run yarn install (takes time to run). Then, each time you make a change, you still have to increment version in shopify-pipeline package.json, and run yarn upgrade shopify-pipeline in your project. Then when you're done, you gotta switch project package.json, increment shopify-pipeline package.json and push it up, and yarn install again in your project.

2. Abstraction & DRY are good in code, but should be avoided in configuration files. They turn configuration into magic black boxes that people avoid touching.

3. HMR doesn't work over tunnels. This makes it useless for collaboration unless your client is in your office. Maybe someone can make HMR work with tunnels -- we spent a bunch of money on upwork, and got nowhere.

4. Filename hashing & asset subdirectories seem great until the first time your client spends a weekend hotfixing a bunch of stuff using the shopify theme editor and you have to figure out how to merge it.

5. In watch mode webpack is re-emitting all the js & css files and their maps on every incremental build, even if only a liquid file is changed.

6. In watch mode webpack is re-emitting every snippet/theme with a local (ie, built) asset_url on every build, regardless of whether the asset it pointed at changed. The liquid-loader calls this.cacheable which should make this not happen -- it might be fixable, but I haven't dug in to that.

7. Because of 4+5, a watch + upload strategy replacement for HMR is very slow, since the map files are large.

8. What webpack watch reports to a custom plugin is kind of bizarre, and makes it difficult to reliably build a plugin to efficiently choose a subset of files to upload to shopify on a change. **

9. The webpack ecosystem is fragmented & confused. Webpack may have won the space, but battleground is full of shellholes. It's reminiscent of working with java in the early 2000s.

10. No clean way to add entry points. You need multiple entry points. You at least need search & checkout entry points for js & css, and it would be better to have template entry points (so that for example the home page isn't loading 250k of javascript that only the product page needs).

11. It's really hard to find out simple things. For example, I've been trying to google up how to turn off filename hashing in watch mode. No luck so far.

** NOTES about webpack watch + custom plugins:
You get the list of chunks -- and its always ALL the js & css entry points (see #4) -- but not the paths to their built files, so you have to build them from the dist dir & current hash. You can get the asset files that the user changed from compilation.timestamps. You can find all the liquid files which were re-emitted (see #5) by walking compilation.assets and finding all the ones which don't have an emitted: true property. But the files with references to the entry points aren't in compilation anywhere. IF I can figure out how to get webpack watch not to re-emit everything on every change, and/or if I do some own hashing of files maybe I'll get to the point of having an efficient subset of files to automatically upload on a change. But, even counting sunk investment, it feels it would be more cost effective to just build out the system I need in gulp.

[shelldandy]

HMR doesn't work over tunnels.

😢

Filename hashing & asset subdirectories seem great until the first time your client spends a weekend hotfixing a bunch of stuff using the shopify theme editor and you have to figure out how to merge it.

lol, that's a classic one, apparently the underlying shopify-node api allows to pull those changes, but its best to educate the client to not do hotfixes on their own or give them tools to edit things without touching code (sections, superfields, etc) that's what has worked best for us to prevent the clients from touching the rendered code.

tl;dr shopify development is messy/hacky but we have to do our best with the tools we have.

PS: I did a mixture of using webpack strictly for JS and everything else with gulp, maybe it can work for you

https://github.com/Pixel2HTML/shopify-skeleton

[lastobelus]

Always-emitting js is solved by downgrading back to webpack 2.x, there are current open issues about this for webpack 3.x.

I found out about yarn link, which is speeding up my experimentation a lot! You have to add:

resolve: {
   symlinks: false
},
module: {
  rules: [
    {
      enforce: 'pre',
      test: /\.js$/,
      exclude: commonExcludes('/node_modules/'),
      loader: 'eslint-loader',
      options: {
        configFile: config.paths.eslintrc
      }
    },
    ...
  }
}

for it to work.

And, I have sucessfully turned off filename hashes:

output: {
  filename: '[name].js',
  chunkFilename: '[name].js'
}

plugins: {
  new ExtractTextPlugin('[name].css')
}

Part of what was frustrating me there was a zombie node watch process! It was taking just a little longer than the current watch, so it would overwrite the non-hash-filename version with the hash-filename version :/. No other signs of it running.

I've decided to give up on writing a webpack plugin to decipher what files actually changed & upload them to shopify, and instead just write a separate watcher that maintains a cache of md5 hashes of files in the dist dir and only uploads touched files whose hash have changed.

[lastobelus]

@Mike3run That looks pretty great!

Have you tried running your browserify setup with a tunnel? I think browserify has a built-in tunnel feature using localtunnel.me, but I haven't tried it.

How would you apply it to an existing project?

[lastobelus]

@t-kelly If you do use a pure webpack build system, I recommend not using filename hashing. Shopify's CDN is already handling caching for us, so it's pointless, and when I turned it off build speed increased by around an order of magnitude.

Apparently it might be tricky to get sourcemaps working without filename hashing, but...they weren't working for me since the beginning anyway.

[shelldandy]

I don't understand the tunnel part you're saying, you mean a proxy? Currently everything works as a proxy without any live reload, so basically everything from src gets worked on and copied to a ./deploy dir where I have a gulp-changed to only upload files that change from there.

https://localhost:3000 maps to your theme preview

For existing projects I usually download the theme from shopify, run the scaffold and then just place everything accordingly. (images in images folder, fonts in fonts folder, js in js folder....)

Edit: just googled the localtunnel thing, seems good, but i don't really see the point when your dev theme is also accessible via the shopify admin on the preview section

You can even share it with:

https://{{SHOP_NAME}}.myshopify.com?preview_theme_id={{THEME_ID}}

[shelldandy]

This is how I got sourcemaps to work with shopify and webpack:

https://github.com/Pixel2HTML/shopify-skeleton/blob/master/src/app/templates/base/webpack.config.js#L22-L26

[lastobelus]

@Mike3run with browserify, the tunnel would just mean that if you were collaborating with someone not on your LAN, that their window would refresh when you made changes. As opposed to HMR, which results in a completely broken site for people who can't see your localhost.

[shelldandy]

Ohh I see, well you can turn it on and try it, I don't have fast internet so when I turned it on it say it works but I guess its not uploading fast enough so Im getting a timeout issue on the tunnel url.

I'm more opinionated towards each developer having its own .env, theme and private api keys to prevent overwriting other people's changes.

[lastobelus]

@Mike3run we use multiple themes, but the sticking point is more demoing & making changes with the end client.

[shelldandy]

Maybe localtunnel doesn't work, I tested a react app and it works but the browsersync with proxy returns a 504 timeout error maybe related to:

localtunnel/localtunnel#82

I usually give the clients the myshopify theme preview url and they can refresh as we speak on the call, etc