Overview

This guide will walk you through the process of adding your own app to Shopware and configuring it, so it is able to communicate to your external backend server.

Prerequisites

If you're not familiar with the app system, please take a look at the concept first.

File structure

To get started with your app, create an apps folder inside the custom folder of your Shopware dev installation. In there, create another folder for your application and provide a manifest file in it.

└── custom
    ├── apps
    │   └── MyExampleApp
    │       └── manifest.xml
    └── plugins

Manifest File

The manifest file is the central point of your app. It defines the interface between your app and the Shopware instance. It provides all the information concerning your app, as seen in the minimal version below:

manifest.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<manifest xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shopware/platform/trunk/src/Core/Framework/App/Manifest/Schema/manifest-1.0.xsd">
    <meta>
        <name>MyExampleApp</name>
        <label>Label</label>
        <label lang="de-DE">Name</label>
        <description>A description</description>
        <description lang="de-DE">Eine Beschreibung</description>
        <author>Your Company Ltd.</author>
        <copyright>(c) by Your Company Ltd.</copyright>
        <version>1.0.0</version>
        <license>MIT</license>
    </meta>
</manifest>

The app can now be installed by running the following command:

bin/console app:install --activate MyExampleApp

By default, your app files will be validated before installation, to skip the validation you may use the --no-validate flag.

For a complete reference of the structure of the manifest file take a look at the Manifest reference.

Setup

If your app backend server and Shopware need to communicate, it is necessary that a registration is performed during the installation of your app. This process is called setup. During the setup it is verified, that Shopware connects to the right backend server and keys are exchanged to secure all further communications. During the setup process your app backend will obtain credentials that can be used to authenticate against the Shopware API. Additionally your app will provide a secret that Shopware will use to sign all further requests it makes to your app backend, allowing you to verify that the incoming requests originate from authenticated Shopware installations.

The setup workflow is shown in the following schema, each step will be explained in detail.

Registration Request

The registration request is made as a GET-Request against a URL that you provide in the manifest file of your app.

manifest.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<manifest xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shopware/platform/trunk/src/Core/Framework/App/Manifest/Schema/manifest-1.0.xsd">
    <meta>
        ...
    </meta>
    <setup>
        <registrationUrl>https://my.example.com/registration</registrationUrl>
    </setup>
</manifest>

The following query parameters will be send with the request:

• shop-id: The unique identifier of the shop, where the app was installed

• shop-url: The URL of the shop, this can later be used to access the Shopware API

• timestamp: The Unix timestamp when the request was created

An example request may look like this:

GET https://my.example.com/registration?shop-id=KIPf0Fz6BUkN&shop-url=http%3A%2F%2Fmy.shop.com&timestamp=159239728

Additionally, the shopware-app-signature header will be provided, which contains a cryptographic signature of the query string. The secret used to generate this signature is the app secret, that is unique per app and will be provided by the Shopware Account if you upload your app to the store. This secret won't leave the Shopware Account, so it won't be even leaked to the shops installing your app.

To verify that the registration can only be triggered by authenticated Shopware shops you need to recalculate the signature and check that the signatures match, thus you've verified that the sender of the request possesses the app secret.

Following code snippet can be used to recalculate the signature:

use Psr\Http\Message\RequestInterface;
​
/** @var RequestInterface $request */
$queryString = $request->getUri()->getQuery();
$signature = hash_hmac('sha256', $queryString, $appSecret);

Registration Response

There may be valid cases where the app installation fails, because the domain is blocked, or some other prerequisite in that shop is not met, in which case you can return the message error as follows

{
  "error": "The shop URL is invalid"
}

When the registration is successful. To verify that you are also in possession of the app secret you need to provide a proof that is signed with the app secret too. The proof consist of the sha256 hmac of the concatenated shopId, shopUrl and your app's name.

Following code snippet can be used to calculate the proof:

use Psr\Http\Message\RequestInterface;
​
/** @var RequestInterface $request */
$queryString = $request->getUri()->getQuery();
parse_str($queryString, $queryValues);
$proof = \hash_hmac(
    'sha256',
    $queryValues['shop-id'] . $queryValues['shop-url'] . $appname,
    $appSecret
);

Besides the proof your app needs to provide a randomly generated secret, that should be used to sign every further request from this shop. Make sure to save the shopId, shopUrl and generated secret, so you can associate and use this information later.

The last thing needed in the registration response is a URL, which the confirmation request will be send to.

A sample registration response may look like this:

{
  "proof": "94b42d39280141de84bd6fc8e538946ccdd182e4558f1e690eabb94f924e7bc7",
  "secret": "random secret string",
  "confirmation_url": "https://my.example.com/registration/confirm"
}

Confirmation Request

If the proof you provided in the registration response matched the one generated on the shop side the registration is completed. As a result your app will receive a POST request against the URL specified as the confirmation_url of the registration with the following parameters send in the request body:

• apiKey: The ApiKey used to authenticate against the Shopware API

• secretKey: The SecretKey used to authenticate against the Shopware API

• timestamp: The Unix timestamp when the request was created

• shopUrl: The URL of the shop

• shopId: The unique identifier of the shop

The payload of that request may look like this:

{
  "apiKey":"SWIARXBSDJRWEMJONFK2OHBNWA",
  "secretKey":"Q1QyaUg3ZHpnZURPeDV3ZkpncXdSRzJpNjdBeWM1WWhWYWd0NE0",
  "timestamp":"1592398983",
  "shopUrl":"http:\/\/my.shop.com",
  "shopId":"sqX6cqHi6hbj"
}

Make sure that you save the api-credentials for that shopId. You can use the apiKey and the secretKey as client_id and client_secret respectively when you request an OAuth token from the admin api.

You can find out more about how to use these api-credentials in our api authentication guide.

The request is signed with the shop-secret, that your app provided in the registration response and the signature can be found in the shopware-shop-signature header. You need to recalculate that signature and check that it matches the provided one, to make sure that the request is really send from shop with that shopId.

You can use following code snippet to generate the signature:

use Psr\Http\Message\RequestInterface;
​
/** @var RequestInterface $request */
$hmac = \hash_hmac('sha256', $request->getBody()->getContents(), $shopSecret);

Permissions

Shopware comes with the possibility to create fine grained Access Control Lists (ACLs). That means that that you need to request permissions if your app needs to read or write data over the API or wants to receive webhooks. The permissions your app needs are defined in the manifest file and are composed of the privilege (read, create, update, delete) and the entity.

Sample permissions to read, create and update products, as well as delete orders look like this:

manifest.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<manifest xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shopware/platform/trunk/src/Core/Framework/App/Manifest/Schema/manifest-1.0.xsd">
    <meta>
        ...
    </meta>
    <permissions>
        <read>product</read>
        <create>product</create>
        <update>product</update>
​
        <delete>order</delete>
    </permissions>
</manifest>

The permissions you request need to be accepted by the user during the installation of your app. After that these permissions are granted for your app and your API access through the credentials from the confirmation request of the setup workflow are limited to those permissions.

Webhooks

With webhooks you are able to subscribe to events occurring in Shopware. Whenever such an event occurs a POST request will be send to the specified URL.

To use webhooks in your app, you need to implement a <webhooks> element in your manifest file, like this:

manifest.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<manifest xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shopware/platform/trunk/src/Core/Framework/App/Manifest/Schema/manifest-1.0.xsd">
    <meta>
        ...
    </meta>
    <webhooks>
        <webhook name="product-changed" url="https://example.com/event/product-changed" event="product.written"/>
    </webhooks>
</manifest>

This example illustrates you how to define a webhook with the name product-changed and the url https://example.com/event/product-changed which will be triggered if the event product.written is fired. So every time a product is changed, your custom logic will get executed. Further down you will find a list of the most important events you can hook into.

An event contains as much data as is needed to react to that event. The data is json contained in the request body. For example:

{
  "data":{
    "payload":[
      {
        "entity":"product",
        "operation":"delete",
        "primaryKey":"7b04ebe416db4ebc93de4d791325e1d9",
        "updatedFields":[
        ]
      }
    ],
    "event":"product.written"
  },
  "source":{
    "url":"http:\/\/localhost:8000",
    "appVersion":"0.0.1",
    "shopId":"dgrH7nLU6tlE"
  },
  "timestamp": 123123123
}

Where the source property contains all necessary information about the Shopware instance that send the request:

• url is the url under which your app can reach the Shopware instance and its api

• appVersion is the version of the app that is installed

• shopId is the id by which you can identify the Shopware instance

The next property data contains the name of the event so that a single endpoint can handle several different events, should you desire. data also contains the event data in the payload property, due to the asynchronous nature of theses webhooks the payload for entity.written events does not contain complete entities as these might become outdated. Instead the entity in the payload is characterized by its id, stored under primaryKey, so that the app can fetch additional data through the shops API. This also has the advantage of giving the app explicit control over the associations that get fetched instead of relying on the associations determined by the event. Other events in contrast contain the entity data that defines the event, but keep in mind that event might not contain all associations.

The next property timestamp is the time which the webhook was handled. This can be used to prevent replay attacks, as an attacker cannot change the timestamp without making the signature invalid. If the timestamp is too old, your app should reject the request. This property is only available from 6.4.1.0 onwards

You can verify the authenticity of the incoming request by checking the shopware-shop-signature every request should have a sha256 hmac of the request body, that is signed with the secret your app assigned the shop during the registration. The mechanism to verify the request is exactly the same as the one used for the confirmation request.

You can use a variety of events to react to changes in Shopware that way. See that table Webhook-Events-Reference for an overview.

App lifecycle events

Apps can also register to lifecycle events of its own lifecycle, namely its installation, updates and deletion. For example they maybe used to delete user relevant data from your data stores once somebody removes your app from their shop.

Example request body:

{
  "data":{
    "payload":[
​
    ],
    "event":"app_deleted"
  },
  "source":{
    "url":"http:\/\/localhost:8000",
    "appVersion":"0.0.1",
    "shopId":"wPNrYZgArBTL"
  }
}

Validation

You can run the app:validate command to validate the configuration of your app. It will check for common errors, like:

• non-matching app names

• missing translations

• unknown events registered as webhooks

• missing permissions for webhooks

• errors in the config.xml file, if it exists

To validate all apps in your custom/apps folder run:

bin/console app:validate

Additionally, you can specify which app should be validated by providing the app name as an argument;

bin/console app:validate MyExampleApp

Handling the migration of shops

In the real world it may happen that shops are migrated to new servers and are available under a new URL. In the same regard it is possible that a running production shop is duplicated and treated as a staging environment. These cases are challenging for app developers. In the first case you may have to make a request against the shop, but the URL you saved during the registration process may not be valid anymore and the shop cannot be reached over this URL. In the second case you may receive webhooks from both shops (prod & staging), that look like they came from the same shop (as the whole database was duplicated), thus it may corrupt the data associated with the original production shop. The main reason that this is problematic is that two Shopware installations in two different locations (on two different URLs) are associated to the same shopId, because the whole database was replicated.

That's why we implemented a safe-guard mechanism that detects such situations, stops the communication to the apps to prevent data corruption and then ultimately let's the user decide how to solve the situation. Notice: This mechanism relies on the fact that the APP_URL environment variable will be set to the correct URL to the shop. Especially it is assumed that the environment variable will be changed, when a shop is migrated to a new domain, or a staging shop is created as a duplicate of a production shop.

Keep in mind that this is only relevant for apps that have their own backends and where communication between app backends and shopware is necessary. That's why simple themes are not affected by shop migrations, they will continue to work.

Detecting APP_URL changes

Everytime a request should be made against an app backend, Shopware will check whether the current APP_URL differs from the one used when Shopware generated an ID for this shop. If the APP_URL differs Shopware will stop sending any requests to the installed apps to prevent data corruption on the side of the apps. Now the user has the possibility to resolve the solution, by using one of the following strategies. The user can either run a strategy with the bin/console app:url-change:resolve command, or with a modal that pops up when the administration is opened.

APP_URL change resolver

• MoveShopPermanently: This strategy should be used if the live production shop is migrated from one URL to another one. This strategy will ultimately notify all apps about the change of the APP_URL and the apps continue working like before, including all the data the apps may already have associated with the given shop. It is important to notice that in this case the apps in the old installation on the old URL (if it is still running) will stop working! Technically this is achieved by rerunning the registration process again for all apps. During the registration the same shopId is used like before, but now with a different shop-url and a different key pair used to communicate over the Shopware API. Also you must generate a new communication secret during this registration process, that is subsequently used for the communication between Shopware and the app backend. This way it is ensured that the apps are notified about the new URL and the integration with the old installation stops working (because a new communication secret is associated with the given shop id, that the old installation does not know).

• ReinstallApps: This strategy makes sense to use in the case of the staging shop. By running this strategy all installed apps will be reinstalled, this means that this installation will get a new shopId, that is used during registration. Because the new installation will get a new shopId, the installed apps will continue working on the old installation as before, but as a consequence the data on the apps side that was associated with the old shopId can not be accessed on the new installation.

• UninstallApps: This strategy will simply uninstall all apps on the new installation, thus keeping the old installation working like before.

API Docs

{
  "error": "The shop URL is invalid"
}

​