Can we please have a rough non-committal ETA for the express build?

[Michael-Gibbons]

Issue summary

I've noticed the development on the express boilerplate has sped up considerably, I've looked it over and it looks very good. A lot of developers including myself are in an awkward position of waiting for this build to be released since the nextjs one is all but deprecated.

Our companies would rather not spend the development time fixing the nextjs boiler or building our own boiler if a new shopify supported boiler is on the horizon. So we're trying to make the value cost between waiting vs building our own.

It would be helpful if we had a very rough non-committal estimate for the release, just for some transparency. I know its never fun to be put in a box like this, so I understand any answer you give is subject to change.

@JaKXz @paulomarg Very sorry to tag you here, I know you guys are extremely busy, but I feel an answer here is very important for the community.

[JaKXz]

Hey @Michael-Gibbons thanks for raising the question. I appreciate the thoughtfulness and consideration you put into your issues and PRs, it goes a long way :) even though we're not able to respond to all of them as quickly as I'd like.

It would be helpful if we had a very rough non-committal estimate for the release, just for some transparency.

My personal opinion on this is that it could be early next week, but, that's just* one person's very non-committal estimate.

FWIW I am very excited about the work in #718, and I'm glad you are too! If I were you, I would start with the code in that branch via npx degit shopify/shopify-app-node#sample_app_updates and also bring over your existing .shopify-cli.yml and .env files. Your workflow can then continue as before with shopify app serve. If you prefer npm to yarn you can remove the yarn.lock and run npm i.

One tip I can offer (if you weren't already aware) is you can add .diff to the end of a github PR url and visit that link, copy the link you are redirected to, and then just apply it via curl & git, e.g. https://github.com/Shopify/shopify-app-node/pull/726.diff:

curl https://patch-diff.githubusercontent.com/raw/Shopify/shopify-app-node/pull/<PR number>.diff | git apply
git checkout -b get-fix-or-feature-from-shopify
# and so on

This is what I would do to keep up with the patches we're making to the sample_app_updates branch, and in future, our main branch if we add more improvements to the starter that you want to take advantage of in an atomic way.

[Michael-Gibbons]

Thank you! Now I know that regardless of the release, the branch is still safe enough to begin general development on. I was worried that there were unforeseen gotchas that we didn't have visibility on because it was related to a more intricate matter like auth or the shopify backend or dependancies.

Very much appreciate this thank you.

[dan-gamble]

Just to add to this. I started building an app out based on @JaKXz's Vite branch before it was merged and everything has worked well for me so far!

[teddyhwang]

Thanks everyone for your patience! We've shipped these changes. We are working towards making sure these starter templates have a regular cadence of updates going forward. We've got some exciting additional updates coming soon as well on the API library side of things (hint: REST wrappers, anyone?)