Vendure

A headless GraphQL ecommerce framework built on Node.js with Nest with TypeScript.

www.vendure.io

Structure

This project is a monorepo managed with Lerna. Several npm packages are published from this repo, which can be found in the packages/ directory.

vendure/
├── admin-ui/       # Source of the admin ui app (an Angular CLI project)
├── docs/           # Documentation source
├── packages/       # Source for the Vendure server & plugin packages
├── scripts/
    ├── codegen/    # Scripts used to generate TypeScript code from the GraphQL APIs
    ├── docs/       # Scripts used to generate documentation markdown from the source

Development

1. Install top-level dependencies

yarn

The root directory has a package.json which contains build-related dependencies for tasks including:

• Building & deploying the docs
• Generating TypeScript types from the GraphQL schema
• Linting, formatting & testing tasks to run on git commit & push

2. Bootstrap the packages

yarn bootstrap

This runs the Lerna "bootstrap" command, which installs dependencies for all packages.

3. Build all packages

yarn build

Packages must be built (i.e. TypeScript compiled, admin ui app built, certain assets copied etc.) before being used.

Note that this can take a few minutes.

4. Set up the server

The server requires an SQL database to be available. I am currently using bitnami-docker-phpmyadmin Docker image, which is MariaDB including phpMyAdmin. However, the simplest option is to use SQLite.

Vendure uses TypeORM, so it compatible will any database which works with TypeORM.

1. Configure the dev config, making sure the connection settings in the getDbConfig() function are correct for the database type you will be using.
2. Create the database using your DB admin tool of choice (e.g. phpMyAdmin if you are using the docker image suggested above). Name it according to the getDbConfig() settings. If you are using SQLite, you can skip this step.
3. Populate mock data with DB=<mysql|postgres|sqlite> yarn dev-server:populate. If you do not specify the db argument, it will default to "mysql".

5. Run the dev server

DB=<mysql|postgres|sqlite> yarn dev-server:start

If you do not specify the db argument, it will default to "mysql".

6. Launch the admin ui

1. cd admin-ui
2. yarn start
3. Go to http://localhost:4200 and log in with "superadmin", "superadmin"

Code generation

graphql-code-generator is used to automatically create TypeScript interfaces for all GraphQL server operations and admin ui queries. These generated interfaces are used in both the admin ui and the server.

Running yarn codegen will generate the following files:

• packages/common/src/generated-types.ts: Types, Inputs & resolver args relating to the Admin API
• packages/common/src/generated-shop-types.ts: Types, Inputs & resolver args relating to the Shop API
• admin-ui/src/app/common/generated-types.ts: Types & operations relating to the admin-ui queries & mutations.
• packages/core/e2e/graphql/generated-e2e-admin-types.ts: Types used in e2e tests of the Admin API
• packages/core/e2e/graphql/generated-e2e-shop-types.ts: Types used in e2e tests of the Shop API

Testing

Server Unit Tests

The server has unit tests which are run with yarn test:common and yarn test:core.

Unit tests are co-located with the files which they test, and have the suffix .spec.ts.

Server e2e Tests

The server has e2e tests which test the API with real http calls and against a real Sqlite database powered by sql.js. The tests are run with yarn test:e2e

The e2e tests are located in /packages/core/e2e. Each test suite (file) has the suffix .e2e-spec.ts. The first time the e2e tests are run, sqlite files will be generated in the __data__ directory. These files are used to speed up subsequent runs of the e2e tests. They can be freely deleted and will be re-created the next time the e2e tests are run.

When debugging e2e tests, set an environment variable E2E_DEBUG=true which will increase the global Jest timeout and allow you to step through the e2e tests without the tests automatically failing due to timeout.

Admin UI Unit Tests

The Admin UI has unit tests which are run with yarn test:admin-ui.

Unit tests are co-located with the files which they test, and have the suffix .spec.ts.

Release Process

All packages in this repo are released at every version change (using Lerna's fixed mode). This simplifies both the development (tracking multiple disparate versions is tough) and also the developer experience for users of the framework (it is simple to see that all packages are up-to-date and compatible).

To make a release:

1. yarn publish-release

It will run lerna publish which will prompt for which version to update to. Although we are using conventional commits, the version is not automatically being calculated from the commit messages. Therefore the next version should be manually selected.

Next it will build all packages to ensure the distributed files are up to date.

Finally the command will create changelog entries for this release.

2. git push origin master --follow-tags

The reason we do not rely on Lerna to push the release to Git is that this repo has a lengthy pre-push hook which runs all tests and builds the admin ui. This long wait then invalidates the npm OTP and the publish will fail. So the solution is to publish first and then push.

User Guide

TODO: Move this info to the docs

Localization

Vendure server will detect the most suitable locale based on the Accept-Language header of the client. This can be overridden by appending a lang query parameter to the url (e.g. http://localhost:3000/api?lang=de).

All locales in Vendure are represented by 2-character ISO 639-1 language codes.

Translations for localized strings are located in the i18n/messages directory.

Errors

All errors thrown by the Vendure server can be found in the errors.ts file.

All errors extend from I18nError, which means that the error messages are localized as described above. Each error type has a distinct code which can be used by the front-end client in order to correctly handle the error.

Orders Process

The orders process is governed by a finite state machine which allows each Order to transition only from one valid state to another, as defined by the OrderState definitions:

export type OrderState =
    | 'AddingItems'
    | 'ArrangingPayment'
    | 'PaymentAuthorized'
    | 'PaymentSettled'
    | 'OrderComplete'
    | 'Cancelled';

This process can augmented with extra states according to the needs of the business, and these states are defined in the orderProcessOptions property of the VendureConfig object which is used to bootstrap Vendure. Additional logic can also be defined which will be executed on transition from one state to another.

License

MIT