Meet Blueprint: Pack's Open-Source Hydrogen Theme

Check out the demo store

Table of Contents

• Our Philosophy
• Major Features
• Pack Features
• Get Started
  • Environment Variables
  • Requirements
  • Building for production
  • Building for local development
• Pack Customizer Content
  • Caching
• Datalayer
• Documentation and Support
• Contributors

Our Philosophy

React is the future of ecommerce, but 99% of all Shopify brands are still using Liquid themes (great for starting out, less optimal for advanced interactivity, flexibility and performance).

Historically, the only way to build a React storefront was to stitch together a headless CMS / hosting / data orchestrator / middleware, then build a custom storefront. It generally required a full technical team to build + manage it.

We’re building component-based, open-source Hydrogen themes to make it easy for a single developer to get a Hydrogen storefront up and running in minutes, and build out an entire storefront in just a few weeks—without having to worry about the back end. Use this theme as examples / inspo, or build right on top of them.

Pack’s Hydrogen theme vs Shopify’s out-of-the-box Hydrogen templates:

We took Hydrogen’s out-of-the-box starter storefront template and spent 3 months adding components, features, animations, styling, and connecting it to Pack—a visual frontend for Shopify Hydrogen—to make it easier to spin up a fully-featured storefront.

Connect your Shopify and Github repo to Pack, and you’ll get access to a real-time visual preview of your storefront as you build. Work in 100% code or a mix of visual editing and code.

Instead of hard-coding the whole experience and having to stay on top of every site change, Pack’s platform makes it easy to hand your finished storefront off to non-technical stakeholders so they can make edits on their own. It’s as easy to use as Shopify.

Major Features

• CSS Framework: Tailwind
• Framework: Remix
• Open-source Hydrogen theme that’s opinionated to Pack, a visual frontend for Hydrogen.
  • Responsive components
    • Heros — multiple slides and configurations
    • 50/50 Hero
    • Product tiles
    • Products slider
    • Product recommendations slider
    • Form builder
    • Tiles row
    • Tiles grid
    • Image tiles
    • Text/markdown block
    • Image block
    • Video/video embed block
    • Html block
    • Reviews slider
    • Press slider
    • Testimonials slider
    • Accordions
    • Icon row
    • Social images grid
  • Marketing & Conversion
    • Back-in-stock alert
    • Blogs
    • Customizable contact form
    • FAQ accordions
    • Press coverage
    • Product badges
    • Product reviews
    • Recommended products
    • Modal
    • In-menu promos
    • Press coverage
    • Promo banners
    • Cross-selling
    • Country selector (change currency, UI/UX for language change)
  • Merchandising
    • Color swatches
    • Image galleries
    • Product options
    • Product tabs
    • Product videos
    • Slideshow
    • Animation
    • Size chart
    • High-resolution images
  • Product discovery
    • Collection page navigation
    • Shopify’s semantic search
    • Search drawer
    • Search page
    • Mega menu
    • Mobile drawer menu
    • Product filtering and sorting
    • Recommended products
    • Sticky header
    • SEO and schema markup fields
  • Site settings, menus and modals
    • Promobar
    • Modal
    • Mobile sidebar menu
    • Footer
      • Email newsletter sign up
      • Country selector (change currency, UI/UX for language change)
    • Header
      • Dropdown menus
      • Mobile drawer menu
  • Search, data & analytics
    • Search drawer
    • Search page
    • Leverages Shopify's API
    • SEO and schema markup fields
  • Cart & checkout
    • Slide-out cart
    • Free shipping meter
    • Product upsell slider
    • Discount code field
    • Quickbuy
    • Cart notes & attributes
  • Shopify analytics (Page views, add to carts)
  • Data layer logic through GA4 (QA’d by Elevar + Fueled)
    • Triggers placed throughout site
      • Page view
      • PDP view
      • Collection view
      • Add to cart
      • Remove from cart
      • View cart
      • Product item click
      • Search results view
      • Login
      • Register
      • Email/phone subscribe
  • Automatic frontend product grouping based on groupings set in Pack admin

Note: Pack is free if you’re only looking to spin up a few landing pages, with pay-as-you-go / custom pricing for large storefronts.

Pack Features

• Visual editor / headless CMS + content environments
• Native integrations with
  • Shopify product catalog
  • GitHub
  • Hydrogen
  • Metaobjects
• Support for Remix and Oxygen
• A/B testing (coming soon)

Get started

Use our CLI tool to get started quickly.

npx @pack/create-hydrogen@latest

You can also create a free Pack account, or check out our documentation.

Want a quick demo of Pack? Check out this video overview (7 min).

Requirements

• Node.js version 16.14.0 or higher

Once you have your project cloned start off by installing your node packages

npm install

Environment Variables

To run your application locally, you can use Shopify's mock.shop API to simulate a Shopify storefront. You can set the PUBLIC_STORE_DOMAIN environment variable to mock.shop to use the mock.shop API.

SESSION_SECRET="foobar"
PUBLIC_STORE_DOMAIN="mock.shop"
PUBLIC_STOREFRONT_API_TOKEN="foobar"

You can automate pull in your Shopify environment variables directly from your Shopify Hydrogen storefront using the Hydrogen CLI. Run the command below and follow its prompts.

npx shopify hydrogen env pull

Alternatively, you can create a .env file and manually copy these values from your Shopify Hydrogen storefront. You can find the variables by going to the Hydrogen storefront > Storefront Settings > Environments & Variables. These are the required variables needed:

SESSION_SECRET="XXX"
PUBLIC_STOREFRONT_API_TOKEN="XXX"
PUBLIC_STORE_DOMAIN="XXX"
PACK_PUBLIC_TOKEN="XXX"
PACK_SECRET_TOKEN="XXX"

Building for production

This command will simulate the same deployment job that Shopify Oxygen will use when deploying your live site.

npm run build

Building for local development

This command will start a server locally on your machine at http://localhost:3000.

npm run dev

Pack Customizer Content

You can access the data in the Pack Customizer by using the pack object that lives in the Hydrogen context. See the following example:

export async function loader({params, context, request}: LoaderFunctionArgs) {
  const {handle} = params;
  const storeDomain = context.storefront.getShopifyDomain();

  const searchParams = new URL(request.url).searchParams;
  const selectedOptions: any = [];

  // set selected options from the query string
  searchParams.forEach((value, name) => {
    selectedOptions.push({name, value});
  });

  const {data} = await context.pack.query(PRODUCT_PAGE_QUERY, {
    variables: {handle},
  });

  const {product} = await context.storefront.query(PRODUCT_QUERY, {
    variables: {
      handle,
      selectedOptions,
    },
  });

  ...
}

The data object will contain all the Pack Section Setting content provided by CMS Authors in the Customizer. This data will be define per each Section's Setting schema. While the product object will contain any Shopify speficic data provided by the Storefront API.

See Section Schema API.

Caching

Pack is leveraging the same Caching Strategy available with the Hydrogen framework. For an example of this, see app/lib/pack/create-pack-client.ts

NOTE: In the future, the lib/pack library will be moved into it's own NPM package provided by Pack.

export function createPackClient(options: CreatePackClientOptions): Pack {
  const {apiUrl, cache, waitUntil, preview, contentEnvironment} = options;
  const previewEnabled = !!preview?.session.get('enabled');
  const previewEnvironment = preview?.session.get('environment');

  return {
    preview,
    isPreviewModeEnabled: () => previewEnabled,
    async query<T = any>(
      query: string,
      {variables, cache: strategy = CacheLong()}: QueryOptions = {},
    ) {
      const queryHash = await hashQuery(query, variables);
      const withCache = createWithCache<QueryResponse<T>>({
        cache,
        waitUntil,
      });

      // The preview environment takes precedence over the content environment
      // provided when creating the client
      const environment =
        previewEnvironment || contentEnvironment || PRODUCTION_ENVIRONMENT;
      const fetchOptions = {
        apiUrl,
        query,
        variables,
        token: options.token,
        previewEnabled,
        contentEnvironment: environment,
      };

      // Preview mode always bypasses the cache
      if (previewEnabled) return packFetch<T>(fetchOptions);

      return withCache(queryHash, strategy, () => packFetch<T>(fetchOptions));
    },
  };
}

Data Layer

The Pack StarterKit will submit pageView and addToCart (coming soon) to Shopify Analytics via the Hydrogen hook. See the following article for more details: https://shopify.dev/docs/api/hydrogen/2023-07/utilities/sendshopifyanalytics

For example on how events are submitted view the products route (app/routes/products.$handle.tsx):

export async function loader({params, context, request}: LoaderFunctionArgs) {
  ...

   if (!data.productPage) {
    throw new Response(null, {status: 404});
  }
  // optionally set a default variant, so you always have an "orderable" product selected
  const selectedVariant =
    product.selectedVariant ?? product?.variants?.nodes[0];

  const productAnalytics: ShopifyAnalyticsProduct = {
    productGid: product.id,
    variantGid: selectedVariant.id,
    name: product.title,
    variantName: selectedVariant.title,
    brand: product.vendor,
    price: selectedVariant.price.amount,
  };
  const analytics = {
    pageType: AnalyticsPageType.product,
    resourceId: product.id,
    products: [productAnalytics],
    totalValue: parseFloat(selectedVariant.price.amount),
  };

  return defer({
    product,
    productPage: data.productPage,
    selectedVariant,
    storeDomain,
    analytics,
  });
}

Documentation and Support

View Pack's developer documentation for info on how to set up and use the platform. Join our Discord community if you get stuck, want to chat, or are thinking of a new feature. Or email us at contact@packdigital.com if Discord isn't your thing. We're here to help - and to make Pack even better!

Contributors

We ❤ all contributions, big and small! Read our quickstart guide for how to set up your local development environment. The TLDR:

• If there’s a bug, raise an issue
• If you have a fix, fork it and do a PR
• If you have a feature request → Raise it as an issue / discussion, put in a PR if you build it If you want to, you can reach out via Discord or email and we'll set up a pair programming session to get you started.