– Junaid was running his own online store before making this app

– Zapier and Google Sheets worked for a while but it wasn’t sustainable

– Shopify’s API has extensive documentation

– Drop shipping is a great way to test items before holding your own inventory

– A lot of these services are trying to compete with Amazon’s fulfillment service

– Openship lets you transition from drop shipping to having your own inventory

– Drop shipping and testing items is almost like pre-selling an app idea

– Junaid hired a contractor early on to help with anything he gets stuck on

– He didn’t have much luck with StackOverflow early on (I’m not surprised!)

– He paid about $500 to $1,000 while developing his project and it was worth it

– Motivation for using Koa and Node

– Shopify has official packages for Koa

– Shopify lets you write custom apps in a lot of different web frameworks

– There’s an Apollo server and a React front-end with Prisma handling the data layer

– The back-end and front-end are in their own separate git repos

– Trade offs between working with a mono repo and multi-repo set up

– Going into a bit more details about the back-end / front-end set up

– Websockets might be used later when an upcoming messaging system is in place

– The work flow for adding Openship to your Shopify app

– Dealing with returns is cumbersome with drop shipping

– High level recap of the work flow as a shop owner

– End customers who purchase items see the usual Shopify checkout work flow

– The marketplace aspect of Openship is very powerful and it’s competitively priced

– Private labeling is another feature that’s coming soon

– The marketplace is a separate Shopify shop that uses Shopify’s API

– The Shopify app is hosted on DigitalOcean using CapRover (self hosted PaaS)

– Prisma runs on its own server which contains the MySQL database

– The 2nd server hosts the back-end (web server) and front-end (React app)

– It was all hosted on 1 server initially but it kept crashing

– Prisma is an open source CMS for a bunch of popular databases

– You typically use tools like Apollo to limit access to Prisma

– The Apollo server prevents anyone from accessing your database

– What exactly is the Apollo server? It’s a GraphQL implementation

– Breaking down the layers of your database, Prisma, Apollo and your client

– Apollo helps deal with multi-tenancy concerns by letting you isolate users

– Openship doesn’t store any confidential info in their own database

– Access control between Shopify and Openship is handled with OAuth

– CapRover handles setting up a reverse proxy and setting up HTTPS

– Openship isn’t running in Docker but Prisma provided its own Dockerfile

– CapRover has a bunch of 1 click installers, one of which is for Sentry

– CapRover is only being used in production

– Postmark is being used to send transactional emails (free tier)

– Junaid pays about $10 to $20 a month for Zapier

– Zapier helps you glue together APIs from external services

– CapRover uses Let’s Encrypt under the hood for managing SSL certificates

– CapRover has a 1 click app on DigitalOcean so it’s easy to install

– DigitalOcean’s monitoring / alerts aren’t being used at the moment

– On the horizon Junaid may switch to using now.sh

– Should you go Serverless or stick with a more traditional app?

– Dealing with secrets and sensitive values when using CapRover

– The full break down of how code gets from development to production

– Running automated tests and the value of CI / CD

– Get a test suite up and running and then worry about CI

– TDD vs writing tests after you write your implementation

– Having a test suite really helps you refactor and improve your code later on

– The difference between testing locally vs using a continuous integration server

– The benefits of CI in an open source project for testing pull requests

– There’s no database backups in place because Shopify is the source of truth

– No health check services are being used but Junaid is using Openship all the time

– Uptime Robot’s free tier is very generous and it pings your site every 5min

– Best tips? Jump into the code, there’s a lot to take in but it’s manageable

– A bad decision beats indecision because you can fix bad decisions

– Junaid got this far with 1 year’s worth of experience which is very impressive

– Check out openship.org and its open source repo on GitHub