How to Integrate Shopify With Service Objects

To get started, you will need to configure your Shopify instance to have a webhook. To do this, you will need to log into your Shopify account. Head down to the Stores, Programs, and Resources and select your store.

From there, you will be redirected to your store’s admin page. While here, you will want to click the Settings icon. This should be all the way on the bottom left portion of the sidebar.

Then you will select Notifications and scroll all the way down until you come to the Webhooks section. To create a webhook, go ahead and select Create Webhook.

On the resulting page, you can define the event that will call the webhook. In this case, we’ll be using the Customer Creation event. We’ll select JSON as the return type, and for the URL we’ll put a placeholder URL of https://abc123.ngrok.io/webhook/validate_email. Shopify requires webhooks to be sent to HTTPS endpoints, so testing directly against a localhost won’t be an option here. This is why a tunneling service like ngrok is used, as it allows users to expose a localhost port to a publicly accessible HTTPS endpoint. This allows us to do some quick testing without having to go through the process of setting up an actual server that would receive requests through a static HTTPS endpoint.

The base ngrok URL will change once we launch the tunneling service to connect to our localhost, but we’ll create an application with the /webhook/validate_email endpoint so that can remain as-is.

Select Save Webhook and voilà! You have successfully created a webhook through Shopify. Now that we have this, we’ll need to create a private app in Shopify so that we can update the customer data and spin up an application in Ruby that will accept the webhook requests.

After you create a webhook, a note should appear below where the webhook is listed that will indicate the HMAC header that all your webhook requests will be signed with. Be sure to save this, as you will need it to ensure that the requests coming to your application are signed with the same HMAC header.

In addition to this, we’ll need to create an app in Shopify so we can update the customer information with the validation info from our Email Validation 3 service. We’ll also need to create a private app to provide the Shopify API with an API Key and API secret that will allow us to update our Shopify instance. Our example will just be a private application, but if you are intending to create a public application, we recommend implementing Shopify’s best practices around authenticating a public app with OAuth.

To add an app, go to your Shopify admin page and select apps:

Then select “Manage Private Apps” at the bottom of the Page. On the resulting page, select “Create New Private App”. Note: You may need to enable using private apps to create a new private app.

After selecting Create New Private App, you will be directed to a page that allow you specify a name and developer email for the new app along with the objects to which your app will have access. For each of these objects, you can select No Access, Read Access, or Read and Write Access. Since we want to update customer information, we’ll set the Customers object to Read and Write Access and set the other objects to No Access.

Click Save at the bottom of the page and you should now be able to select the app you just created and subsequently view the API key and password that were generated. Be sure to keep these handy along with your store name, as we’ll use those values when we use the Shopify class library to update our customer information.

As mentioned previously, we’ll be using Ruby in our example to create an endpoint that will listen for the webhook. To start, we’ll create a file called app.rb along with a gem file that will detail all the dependencies we’ll be using for our application.

The gem file should contain the following dependencies:

As stated previously, we’ll use the Shopify gem to update our customer information, the Sinatra gem to launch a quick webservice and the activesupport gem to calculate and verify the HMAC header that gets sent along with the webhook.

At the top of the app.rb file we’ve created we’ll add the following require statements and global variables:

The require statements will tell our Ruby app which gems we will need to run this program and the global variables that are declared will allow the Shopify gem to properly update the customer information. Before launching this app, be sure to fill in the SHARED_SECRET, API_KEY, PASSWORD, and SHOP_NAME values with the appropriate values for your store and Shopify app that we just created.

Next, we’ll create a helper method that will ensure the calculated HMAC value from the request is equal to the value present in the header of the request that will be sent to the endpoint that will be listening for the webhook request.

As we defined earlier, the endpoint to which the webhook will make a request will end in “/webhook/validate_email”. To create this endpoint, all we need to do is create the following code:

Now we have an endpoint that will listen for POST requests! Let’s go about adding some processing in the method. For starters, we will rewind the post body and send it to the helper method we created that will calculate the HMAC of the post body and ensure that it matches up to the header sent in the request. We’ll also parse out the request body into json format and pull out the email that we’ll use to send to the DOTS Email Validation 3 service. Additionally, we’ll instantiate the license key. Put your own Service Objects license key here!

Now that we have set up, we can setup or calls to the EV3 web service along with proper failover configuration.