Developing Shopware Plugins

The Shopware images of dockware are a perfect fit if you want to develop Shopware plugins.

Every image comes with an installed and prepared Shopware, so you can immediately start coding. Depending on your environment strategy, you can even switch to a different Shopware version by just changing one single version number. Sounds good? Let's discover more.

Environment Strategy

The first thing you want to clarify is, what type of infrastructure your project needs.

You can always create custom installations of Shopware by using the plain dockware/web image, additional database containes or more.

But we usually recommend using the dockware/shopware image and just bind mount your plugin to the demo installation of Shopware. This allows you to easily switch Shopware versions without a lot of hazzle.

The next thing to decide, is, if you need the full source code of Shopware locally in your IDE to use code completion and more.

Our sample in this tutorial, will use exactly this approach. We will only mount our plugin, but also prepare the source code of Shopware locally for a better developer experience.

Create Environment

We start by creating a docker-compose.yml file.

This will typically only contain 1 single container. However, depending on your needs, you can always add more, such as ELK stacks for logging and other useful and required services for your developer experience.

shop:
    image: dockware/shopware:6.7.2.2
    container_name: shop
    volumes:
      # ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      # PLUGINS
      # our plugin GIT repository is in a sub folder custom/plugins
      - "./custom/plugins/MyPlugin:/var/www/html/custom/plugins/MyPlugin"
      # ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      # exclude some folders for better performance
      # this uses anonymous volumes that leads to container/host decoupling for these folders
      # therefore less bind-mount -> better performance
      - "/var/www/html/custom/plugins/MyPlugin/.git/"
      - "plugin_vendor:/var/www/html/custom/plugins/MyPlugin/vendor/"
      - "plugin_node_admin:/var/www/html/custom/plugins/MyPlugin/src/Resources/app/administration/node_modules/"
      - "plugin_node_storefront:/var/www/html/custom/plugins/MyPlugin/src/Resources/app/storefront/node_modules/"
    ports: 
      - "80:80"
      - "443:443"
      - "3306:3306"
    environment:
      - XDEBUG_ENABLED=1

And that's it. Start your Docker environment and you should be able to access http(s)://localhost to access your Shopware.

docker-compose up -d

If you need to use domains instead of localhost, please see this page Domains with HTTPS

If your browser shows invalid certificates, just continue (in Chrome just type "thisisunsafe"). With Shopware, keep in mind, your Storefront is only available if you create a dedicated domain entry in your sales channel - but you actually just need the Administration anyway.

Prepare Local Shopware

When you either initially start your project, or after switching to a different Shopware version by changing the docker-compose.yml file, you might want to download the source code to use code completion in your IDE.

Why do we need this? Because we have only mounted our plugin for a better performance but also decoupling of the used Shopware version.

So all we need now, is a small script that just downloads the files from the container to your host. This is not needed all the time, just initially or after changing Shopware versions.

Here is a sample based on a makefile with the command make download-src. It first cleans our local vendor folder of Shopware, and then just downloads everything. Feel free to improve it for you.

download-src: 
    rm -rf ./vendor/* || true
    docker cp shop:/var/www/html/. ./

And that's it, you now have everything locally with a wonderful developer experience!

Where to go from here?

Depending to the complexity of your project, you might require additional things such as new containers, installation scripts to automatically install dependencies and more.

This is not really part of dockware, because it's really bound to your special needs. The great thing is, it is all just plain Docker, so you can basically build and connect everything you need.

Here are a few typical things you usually want in your projects

HTTP and SSL

Use HTTPS instead of HTTP for your projects

Improve Bind-Mounting

Optimize performance and structure when it comes to bind-mounting your source code

Shopware Image Features

Explore the features of dockware/shopware to improve your development envrionment.