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Shopify / shopify-app-template-remix

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Store Remix based App Bridge apps, on Shopify, to improve the client demo experience #626

Closed charlesr1971 closed 5 months ago

charlesr1971 commented 5 months ago

When a Remix based app, is embedded into the Shopify Admin, using App Bridge, in development, in order to keep the app displayed, it is neccessary to keep the Ngrok/Cloudflare tunnel, open.

If I want to show a client, the progress of an app, I either have to keep the tunnel open, or deploy the app to a remote host. The latter is impractical, during the development phase. Deploying an app to a remote server, for every little change that a client might require, is frustrating. On the other hand, the App Bridge tunnel is quite fragile & often disconnects. This isn’t ideal when trying to project a level of professionalism to a client, who wishes to view changes made to an app.

So what is the answer to this problem?

How about, keeping the app code files/assets & DB, on the Shopify server, during the development phase. This would allow the app to display correctly, 24/7. I am not sure whether an app goes through a build, after an HMR hot reload? But, maybe this is the answer, to keep the codebase footprint, to a minimum, whilst it is stored on the Shopify server, during the development phase.

Having a reliable way to demo an app, in development, is extremely important, for generating trust between a Dev community and its technical ecosystem. Please can someone address this issue, because for some of us, this is a deal breaker, when trying to decide, which e-commerce platform, is deserving of our attention. 🙂

lizkenyon commented 5 months ago

Hi there 👋

We are always looking to review and improve our development experiences. I will share your feedback with the team.

In the meantime I might suggest looking into some of the hosting services that make it quite easy to deploy to a cloud service. Heroku and Vercel are popular choices in the app developer community. These can be configured to deploy when pushing to a main branch.

charlesr1971 commented 5 months ago

@lizkenyon Thanks for the response.

Yes. I am using fly.io for my remote hosting requirements, however, during the prototyping stage, App Bridge & HMR, is vital.

It really would be great to have some kind of persistence, in development, so that I can review & fix code, in front of my client.

Running:

fly deploy

Everytime, I need to make small changes, just isn’t practical.

Thank you, for your understanding 🙂