Front-Commerce Lite contains everything you need to get started in minutes with the main libraries used in Front-Commerce. Consider it as a boilerplate for prototyping an eCommerce application.

Here is what Front-Commerce Lite can help you with:

• start learning new technologies and concepts,
• experiment an idea with your team,
• evaluate Front-Commerce,
• convince your boss,
• or win projects by building a PoC.

• zero configuration: start developing right away, all the tooling is already configured for you
• great developer experience: get in the flow with immediate feedback and interactive tools (HMR, GraphiQL and Storybook)
• up-to-date libraries: webpack, react, apollo, react-router… experiment with their latest features
• microservices friendly: understand the power of a GraphQL middleware for your microservices and start combining them in a creative way
• component based: browse our sample components to understand Front-Commerce’s implementation of Atomic Design
• living design system: discuss with your team and UX designers about how a Design System could improve your workflow, and test this process on a prototype built with Front-Commerce Lite

Front-Commerce Lite is an open source project designed after a more complete and production ready product named Front-Commerce. It has been created with development in mind and does not contain any tooling or practices for production deployments. See the What it is NOT section for more details.

We are on a mission to improve web quality and shopping experience on eCommerce stores. Hence our vision is to sell a product that contains all the best practices for building qualitative online stores by default, so teams can stay focused on what is relevant to their context.

One of the most frequent feedback we have from developers and teams when introducing Front-Commerce is:

Your product looks neat! Could we start playing with it, in order to (insert a totally valid reason here)?

We want you to understand the philosophy and the power of the technologies and architecture principles we chose. In our opinion code is the best way to do it!

However, learning from the whole Front-Commerce codebase might be a daunting task for people not used to the JavaScript / React / GraphQL ecosystem. Since our goal is to take care of this complexity, we thought it would be better to create a simpler playground.

Front-Commerce Lite is a simpler version of what we have developed. It uses the same libraries and follows the same principles and conventions. A direct consequence is that our documentation works for both Front-Commerce and Front-Commerce Lite.

We made some opinionated choices in order to keep things simple while allowing you to dig into the code and understand how everything works under the hood.

Simple does not mean useless, and Front-Commerce Lite is aimed at helping teams to « build stuff » and move forward. Use it to learn, understand, prototype or sell Front-Commerce to your stakeholders!

Start building something now!

The following steps are all you need if you already are familiar with the JavaScript ecosystem. Otherwise, jump to the next section.

1. git clone [email protected]:front-commerce/front-commerce-lite.git
2. cd front-commerce-lite && npm install
3. npm start
4. open your favorite editor and start coding!

You may encounter difficulties to install or launch this project. You may also want to understand step by step what is happening. It is totally fine, we are here to learn! Time has come to discover our official documentation for developers…

Install Front-Commerce Lite (developers.front-commerce.com)

If you still have troubles with this task, feel free to get in touch with us and ask questions. It could be a problem on our side too.

Now that you have Front-Commerce Lite installed, you can play and experiment with it. You can browse Front-Commerce’s developer documentation to understand our implementation and architecture.

Here are some tasks you can try:

• Adapt the theme to your brand
• Create or tweak a UI Component
• Create a new Page
• Extend the GraphQL schema
• Create a Business Component

If you need help we encourage you to search on the web first. It will help you discover the community around each project. You might find additional resources for learning each library in-depth when you will be ready.

You can also open issues with the tag « question » and we will do our best to answer it. Of course, you can browse answered questions and try to help others by answering their opened questions.

We have a Slack channnel that you can join to ask for help and if you need anything else, send us an email!

The « Lite » keyword in the project name has its importance. Our vision is to help you understand what you could achieve with such a tool, without introducing unnecessary complexity. The path to a successful and production ready store is long and that is why we have built Front-Commerce in the first place.

Front-Commerce is not an open source product and we cannot share all the code behind it. Thus, we had to make opinionated choices about what not to include in Front-Commerce Lite.

Here are the features we do not plan to add in Front-Commerce Lite:

• SSR: with SSR comes some constraints and complexity we not consider necessary for this project. We prefer keeping the implementation simple and straightforward to allow you to analyze how everything works internally. If you want to see SSR in action, please refer to Front-Commerce’s public demo.
• complete eCommerce pages: we will try to keep the number of pages and components as minimal as possible to make it easier to see the whole picture. Our goal is to showcase possible use cases. In a real project, you will have more pages (account, forgotten password, contact page…) to manage
• optimized production builds: the tooling is for a development context only. If you want to create a production config, you will have to do it and maintain it yourself (it is a great way to learn)
• deployment recipes: if you want to share your project with the world, you will have to create your own deployments for your hosting provider of choice
• performance optimization: GraphQL resolvers in Front-Commerce use the DataLoader pattern with caching to improve performance with slow backends. We do not want to introduce this complexity here.
• refactorings or library upgrades that do not match what is available in Front-Commerce: we do not want to lie to you about Front-Commerce’s state, and want Front-Commerce Lite to match what you will find in Front-Commerce. We want to update Front-Commerce Lite only when the code is merged in Front-Commerce. Refactorings could be trivial here but not as straightforward there…
• backwards compatibility: Front-Commerce Lite should be used for learning or prototyping. We do not recommend to build a long living project with it! Things may be broken.
• middleware or backoffice access: we do not want to maintain complex backend systems for allowing developers to customize data. If you want to use your own catalog, you will have to be creative and adapt the core. We can create dedicated demo instances for partners or serious potential customers. If you would like to go further with your prototype and are interested by Front-Commerce, send us an email and we will see how we could help.

Convinced that Front-Commerce Lite’s stack is viable enough for your project? If yes, we achieved our goal!

You now have several solutions:

• start a project from scratch using these technologies. If your needs are simple it could be a solution, otherwise prepare yourself to months of work!
• compare with existing alternatives and choose the one which fits your needs and budget: features, architecture, test coverage and (if they are open source) the quality of their codebase
• fork Front-Commerce Lite in the open, follow our philosophy and architecture… and name it React Storefront :)
• use Front-Commerce and start developing your features on top of a production ready solution right now!

📧 Contact our team to get further information and contract a Front-Commerce license.

MIT