Preface

Shopify has grown by leaps and bounds over the last few years and their ever expanding client list means that now is the perfect time to build a killer app to meet the needs of storeowners across the globe. With the release of the App Store, customers can read reviews, see screenshots, and install apps with a few clicks.

There has been a lot of effort from Shopify to make the developer experience as simple as possible. Free software libraries, extensive documentation, and a comprehensive API makes building and launching an app an enjoyable and lucrative process.

This book will teach you how to build an app starting with the setup of your local development environment, installing Ruby, and generating a basic Rails application.

Next, we'll go through several iterations as we build, refactor, and enhance our app, so that you get a feel of development best practices that are currently being used by software companies around the world. We'll wrap up monetizing the app using the Shopify Billing API, which is a simple and PCI-compliant way for us to charge users when they upgrade.