Contributing

Please read before contributing to Merchant Center Application Kit in order to get familiar with the guidelines for contributing to the project.

Core Ideas

The Merchant Center is a Multi Single-Page-Application where effectively multiple applications are running within the same domain, giving it a look and feel of being one big application. In fact, sections of the Merchant Center such as Dashboard, Orders, Products, etc are all different applications. You can read more about the architecture here.

With that in mind, developing a Custom Application for the Merchant Center requires a set of tools and components that should be used across the different applications, as they share some common logic. This repository contains all the minimal packages that are necessary to do that. Some of them do not need to be used directly but are instead required by other packages. Let's have a deeper look.

If you are developing Custom Application please make sure refer to the documentation: https://docs.commercetools.com/custom-applications.

Submitting a Pull Request

Good pull requests, such as patches, improvements, and new features, are a fantastic help. They should remain focused in scope and avoid containing unrelated commits.

If possible, please try to provide a related issue first, where the topic is discussed and agreed upon before starting to work on that. This is helpful for both you and the maintainers to be familiar with the changes beforehand.

Folder Structure

This repository is managed as a monorepo, meaning it contains multiple (sub)packages located in the packages directory.

packages/
  actions-global/
  application-components/
  application-config/
  application-shell/
  application-shell-connectors/
  assets/
  babel-preset-mc-app/
  browser-history/
  constants/
  create-mc-app/
  eslint-config-mc-app/
  i18n/
  jest-preset-mc-app/
  jest-stylelint-runner/
  l10n/
  mc-dev-authentication/
  mc-html-template/
  mc-http-server/
  mc-scripts/
  notifications/
  permissions/
  react-notifications/
  sdk/
  sentry/
  url-utils/

Overview of main packages

Below a short description of the most import packages:

application-components

This package contains React components for developing Merchant Center applications, similarly to what the UiKit implements.

application-config

This package contains utilities for configuring Custom Applications. It also defines the JSON schema for the Custom Application configuration file.

application-shell

This package is the most important one and contains the core logic of a Merchant Center application (login, intl, base layout, etc). To develop an application, you need to render the <ApplicationShell> component first (see package documentation). The package also initializes different things such as intl, apollo, routing, etc.

application-shell-connectors

This package is a complementary package of the application-shell and contains "connector" components that use the new React Context API. The main purpose of those "connectors" is to make it easier for the consumer to access data in any place of the application.

assets

This package contains static assets, such as SVG images.

constants

This package contains a set of useful constant variables.

create-mc-app

This package contains a CLI to bootstrap a starter application based on a predefined template.

eslint-config-mc-app

This package contains a set of linting rules useful to use as a preset of your eslint config.

i18n

This package contains React components for accessing internationalization data such as intl messages (of the application kit packages), moment locales, etc.

jest-preset-mc-app

This package contains a preset configuration for Jest, focused on necessary tools and transformers for a Merchant Center application code.

l10n

This package contains React components for accessing localization data such as country, currency, language, time zone, etc.

mc-scripts

If you're familiar with react-scripts, this CLI works very similarly except that it is configured to work for developing Merchant Center Applications.

permissions

This package contains React components to apply permissions in your application code (e.g. prevent access to a view if the user does not have the correct scopes, etc).

react-notifications

This package contains React components to render notification (e.g. error message, success message, etc).

sdk

This package contains React components to perform requests in a declarative way. Underneath it uses our js-sdk to perform the network requests.

Setting up a local copy

Clone the repository
Run pnpm install in the root folder

Once it's done, you can run pnpm run test (pnpm run test --watch) to test your changes.

Developing locally

To develop locally, you can use the playground application to test the changes in some of the packages. Make sure to pnpm build the packages before starting the playground app because the app consumes the packages as normal "transpiled" dependencies.

You can also run the build in watch mode pnpm build:bundles:watch alongside with pnpm playground:start to rebundle and rebuild the application on each change.

Adding changesets

commercetools application-kit uses changesets to do versioning and creating changelogs.

As a contributor you need to add a changeset by running pnpm changeset. The command will prompt to select the packages that should be bumped, their associated semver bump types and some markdown which will be inserted into the changelogs.

When opening a Pull Request, a changeset-bot checks that the Pull Request contains a changeset. A changeset is NOT required, as things like documentation or other changes in the repository itself generally don't need a changeset.

Releasing packages

commercetools application-kit uses changesets to do versioning and publishing a release.

A Changesets release GitHub Action opens a Version Packages Pull Request whenever there are some changesets that have not been released yet.

When the Version Packages Pull Request gets merged, the Changesets release GitHub Action will automatically trigger the release.

Canary releases

On main branch, we automatically publish canary releases from CI to the canary distribution channel, after the build runs successfully.

Canary releases are useful to test early changes that should not be released yet to next or latest. They are automatically triggered and released after a Pull Request merged into main.

Note that canary releases will not create git tags and version bump commits.

GraphQL files and linting

In order to be able to validate GraphQL queries and mutations, defined as .graphql files, we use the eslint-plugin-graphql, which requires introspection schemas from the different GraphQL APIs being used.

To download the remote schemas simply run pnpm generate-types. The configuration of each schema is defined in the codegen.*.yml files, in the root directory. Running this script will download the schemas in the schemas/*.json files.

NOTE that you need your user mcAccessToken to be defined as an environment variable MC_ACCESS_TOKEN in .env file. This will be used by the introspection queries to be able to download the schemas from the MC API. Additionally, you also need to specify one of your CTP_PROJECT_KEY where you have access to.

Since the MC uses multiple GraphQL APIs, we need to differentiate which queries use which schema. To do so, prefix the file extension with one of the GraphQL targets:

mc: instead of .graphql use *.mc.graphql (graphql target: mc)
settings: instead of .graphql use *.settings.graphql (graphql target: settings)
ctp: instead of .graphql use *.ctp.graphql (graphql target: ctp)
proxy: instead of .graphql use *.proxy.graphql (API in the MC frontend apps)

Visual Studio Code recommended workspace

The file recommended.code-workspace contains a pre-defined VSCode configuration that is optimized for working in this repository. It also contains the extension recommendations to effectively work with MDX, the writing style linter and more.

When opening the project folder, VSCode detects that there is a workspace configuration available and prompts the option to open it. When VSCode loads the workspace configuration, it asks to automatically install all recommended extensions.

If you wish to keep your own settings.json config, you might consider to pick the configuration that you need from the recommended config.

merchant-center-application-kit/CONTRIBUTING.md