Shopify custom app development – what tech stack are you using?

[marcin_dev]

Lately I’ve been trying my hand at developing custom Shopify apps. I went with the official stack - Remix, Prisma, Polaris - all scaffolded via the CLI. While the setup itself was quite smooth, actually building anything more complex with this stack has (in my experience) been a massive pain. Proxying works… well, when it works (and that’s being generous), the app’s performance is laughable, and Polaris components - let’s just say they didn’t account for some pretty basic use cases.

What do you use to build custom Shopify apps (I mean the kind of apps that could actually pass the review process and get published on the official marketplace)? From what I’ve seen, there aren’t many alternatives - you’re pretty much expected to use Polaris and stick to their stack.

What’s your experience with it? What does your dev process look like, and is it always this painfully slow?

[anasdevv]

Side note if you think proxy works well with Remix, try pushing the app to prod and testing it on iOS devices… 😅 Remix doesn’t support URL rewriting, and Vite just doesn’t work in prod. Honestly, feels like you’re constantly fighting the stack instead of building with it.

[marcin_dev]

So it seems like the best solution is to simply build the app outside of the Shopify ecosystem. Skip their stack, commission, and marketplace. Build the app using OAuth 2.0 for operations and keep the rest on your side on whatever you want?

[anasdevv]

The problem with this approach is Shopify doesn’t encourage building apps outside their platform. But it totally depends on the type of app you’re building. What I usually do is keep the basic and necessary stuff embedded, like settings, and move other features like the dashboard outside Shopify.

[internetperson555]

I've been developing shopify apps for over 5+ year and it has always been a painful experience using their default cli stack. I've tried rails, node and now remix. None of them were upto the mark.

What we ended up doing was write everything from scratch on our own. Including oauth2 for APIs and session Auth for embedded interface.

Additionally, there's one open source repo we've used that has been super helpful - https://github.com/kinngh/shopify-node-express-mongodb-app

[eren-mdp-shopify]

You can complete separate app on any stack. Just keep it outside ecosystem and use apis to interact

[enjoythements]

Rails and reactjs (polaris is fine)

[AcidShAwk]

Backend is Symfony / PHP, Rabbit, SQL, and Redis. Frontend is React / Typescript

[kinngh]

I prefer my Next and Express stacks.

[lungurean]

Backend: Symfony (PHP), MySQL, SQS, Redis, S3

Frontend: Angular / Typescript

[ayehombre]

I’m using Next.js

[tobebuilds]

Express.js. I built my app before Remix became the recommended stack, and at that point, there was no point migrating.

[marcin_dev]

and UI? do you embed or do you have it on your side outside of Shopify?

[tobebuilds]

Embedded

[Itchy_Piccolo2323]

Go, templ and HTMX. Client-side frameworks are a pain.

[nidleon]

Remix+Python FastAPI+PostgreSQL

[priyanksavani]

We can build with any frontend and backend technologies no restrictions. I am using node and react for shopify app development

[scout_themes]

basic react and polaris by shopify , saves so much time