ReactJS

Build Beautiful Storefronts Quickly with Shopify and Next

Published Nov 1, 2023

Updated Nov 29, 2023

4 min read

Introduction

Shopify is one of the world’s best e-commerce platforms for building online stores of any size. It’s a hosted platform, which means you don’t have to worry about the technical details of managing a server or dealing with software updates. You can focus on building your business instead. Next.js is a React framework for building static and server-side rendered applications. It’s a great choice for building e-commerce storefronts and enables you to do more customization, and it’s what we’ll be using in this article.

Shopify Next.js Starter Kit

Recently, we’ve created a starter kit that you can use to build your own Shopify storefront with Next.js. It’s a great way to get started quickly especially since it is powered by the new App Router and React Server Components, and it’s completely free. You can find it on GitHub here: Shopify Next.js Starter Kit

We also have a live demo of the starter kit here: Shopify Next.js Starter Kit Demo

Getting Started

To get started, open your terminal and run the following command:

And choose Shopify, NextJS 13.4 and Tailwind CSS starter.dev - choose Shopify, NextJS 13.4 and Tailwind CSS

Then, choose the project name choose project name

And everything ready to go, next steps are to go to the directory and install the packages

Setup Shopify Account

Next, you’ll need to create a Shopify store. There are two ways to get a Shopify account:

1- You can do this by going to Shopify and clicking on the “Start free trial” button and create a Shopify account.

2- Or you can create a Shopify Partner Account for development purposes

Once you’ve created your store, you’ll need to create a private app. You can do this by going to the “Apps” section of your Shopify admin and clicking on the “Manage private apps” link. Then click on the “Create a new private app” button. Give your app a name, and then click on the “Save” button. You’ll then be taken to a page where you can see your API credentials. You’ll need to copy these credentials into your .env.local file. You can find the .env.local file at the root of your project. It should look something like this:

Modify the design

After adding the required secrets, run npm run dev to run the development server locally the demo shopify application built using starter.dev

The project structure is simple and easy. Since we are using the App Router, all of the routes are under /app folder and the shared components are under /components folder. This structure make it easy for you to edit and modify easily on the design starter.dev folder structure

Also all of the components have been written in a clean way with Tailwind CSS to make it easy for you to edit it.

Deploy

Since it’s a Next.js project, its deployment is easier than ever, most of the modern host providers support deploying it with just one click like

Just push the project to a remote git repository using GitHub and connect it to the hosting provider of your choice.

Conclusion

In this article, we’ve shown you how to build a Shopify storefront with Next.js with our new starter kit from Starter.dev. We’ve also shown you how to use the new App Router and React Server Components to build a fast and performant storefront. We hope you’ve enjoyed this article and found it useful. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out to us on Twitter or GitHub. We’d love to hear from you!

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About the author(s)

Mark Shenouda
@MarkSShenouda @markshenouda

Tim Neutkens, Co-Author of Next.js on the State of Next

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Maximizing Server Rendering for Interactive Next.js Applications

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Building a Lightweight Shopping Experience To illustrate the concept, we'll build a lightweight shopping experience with a list of products and an "Add to Cart" button that opens a drawer with the added cart items. Most of the page will be server-rendered, and we'll use client components only to show the drawer. Even the drawer itself will not be entirely a client component; rather, the wrapper necessary to show the drawer will be a client component, while the contents will be server-rendered. This can be accomplished by the nature of client components that can accept server-rendered content. We'll set up a React context provider at the layout level, which will control showing or hiding the cart. This provider will be used by our client components (the "Add to Cart" button and the "Show Cart" button), as well as by the drawer wrapper. 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The AddToCartButton is a client component that reads the React context and calls its setCartShown function after adding to the cart has been completed. This will, in turn, set the isCartShown flag on the provider and show the cart drawer, which also reads the isCartShown flag from the provider. How is the cart updated, though? We'll use a server action named addToCartAction for that. We'll explain how this works in a bit, but in the meantime, let's see the implementations of the AddToCart button and the CartDrawer component. ` Similar to the CartProvider component, the' CartDrawer' component is a thin client component wrapper around its contents. It reads the React context provided by the CartProvider and passes it to the Sheet component from the Shadcn library. The SheetContent component accepts cart contents as children passed from the CartDrawer's parent, which is server-rendered. ` Using Server Actions and Cache Invalidation But how do we ensure that the contents are updated? The contents are an RSC component called CartContents that calls getCachedCart in the data access layer. In real-world scenarios, getCachedCart would probably call a database or an API, but we have neither here. So, we'll simulate a database through the use of the file-system-db package, a lightweight Node library that can write and read to a JSON file as a database. The get calls to the database are wrapped in unstable_cache, which allows us to tag such requests with cart. This means CartContents is initially fetching data from the tagged getCachedCart call. ` Whenever we mutate the cart, we want to call invalidateTags("cart"). This will force purging of Next.js caches and consequently re-render the cart. For example, the "Add to Cart" button calls the addToCartAction server action, which adds the item to the database and calls invalidateTags("cart"). 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One of the things you'll note from the $effect rune is that dependencies don't need to be explicit. Those will be picked from reactive values read synchronously in the body of the effect function. ` Something to bear in mind is that these dependencies are picked each time the effect runs. The values read during the last run become the dependencies of the effect. ` Depending on the result of the random method, foo or bar will stop being a dependency of the effect. You should place them outside the condition so they can trigger reruns of the effect. *Variants* of the effect rune are $effect.pre, which runs before a DOM update, and $effect.tracking(), which checks for the context of the effect (true for an effect inside an effect or in the template). $props This rune replaces the export let keywords used in previous versions to define a component's props. To use the $props syntax, we can consider it to return an object with all the properties a component receives. 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Nov 27, 2024

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Build Beautiful Storefronts Quickly with Shopify and Next

Introduction

Shopify Next.js Starter Kit

Getting Started

Setup Shopify Account

Modify the design

Deploy

Conclusion

Mark Shenouda

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