README.md

In charliebone/shopifyr: An R Interface to the Shopify API

shopifyr

shopifyr aims to provide an easy-to-use interface to the Shopify Admin API within R.

Getting Started

To get started, install the latest version of shopifyr from CRAN:

install.packages("shopifyr")

Alternatively, you may install the latest development version of the shopfiyr package with the following code (requires the remotes package):

remotes:::install_github("charliebone/shopifyr")

Please note that the shopifyr package depends on the curl, jsonlite and R6 packages. They will need to be installed in order to install shopifyr.

In addition, you may query the Shopify GraphQL Admin API using this package.

After installation is complete, read the notes below. In order to take full advantage of this package, it is highly recommended that you become familiar with the features of the Shopify Admin API.

Using the ShopifyShop Class

The workhorse of the shopifyr package is the ShopifyShop class. It is written using the R6 class implementation, which is a lightweight implementation of R's reference class.

The ShopifyShop class encapsulates all the API functionality into a single object, allowing simple and expressive access to the Shopify API. To get started, you first must create a ShopifyShop object:

library(shopifyr)
shopUrl <- "shopname.myshopify.com"
password <- "your_private_app_password"
shop <- ShopifyShop$new(shopUrl, password)

# view shop information
shop$shopInfo       # displays cached shop information
shop$getShop()      # fetches current shop information from server

All the data sent to and from Shopify is structured as a list in R. The ShopifyShop member functions will encode that list data as JSON prior to sending it to the Shopify server.

For example, it's fairly straightforward to create a new product for your store:

product <- list(title="The R Inferno",
                body_html="<b>The R Inferno</b> <i>by Patrick Burns</i>",
                vendor="Burns Statistics",
                product_type="Paperback",
                images=list(list(src="http://www.burns-stat.com/wp-content/
                                      uploads/2012/12/R_inferno_cover.jpg")))
newProduct <- shop$createProduct(product)

Each JSON object or array is structured as a list. Note how the images element of the product in the code snippet above is a list (array) containing one or more lists (objects representing each image).

The returned object newProduct is the response from Shopify after the successful product addition. It will contain additional fields beyond those in the product object sent to Shopify, including the Shopify-assigned product id.

Given the product id, adding a metafield to the new product is relatively straightforward:

metafield <- list(namespace="books",
                  key="author",
                  value="Patrick Burns",
                  value_type="string")
newMetafield <- shop$createMetafield("products", resourceId=newProduct$id, metafield=metafield)

Once again, the returned newMetafield object will have additional fields populated by Shopify.

You can also add the new product to an existing collection:

# get all custom collections and find the collection named "Books"
collections <- shop$getCustomCollections()
books <- Find(function(x) { x$title == "Books" }, collections)

# create a new Collect linking the new product with the desired collection
newCollect <- shop$createCollect(list(product_id=newProduct$id, collection_id=books$id))

In addition to manipulating products and collections, the Shopify API provides a multitude of other functionality. Here is an example of how to search for customers named Bob from the United States:

bobs <- shop$searchCustomers("Bob country:United States")

To execute a query on the Shopify GraphQL Admin API as described here. For example, to query for all books with 'Inferno' in the title, you could do the following:

query <- '
{
  products(first:5, query:"title=Inferno"){
    edges{
      node{
        id
      }
    }
  }
}'

infernoBooks <- shop$graphQlQuery(query)

For a complete list of functions and their corresponding documentation, see the ?ShopifyShop help page. You may get to a function's documentation directly just by invoking the help with that function's name, e.g. ?searchCustomers.

Obtaining API credentials

The ShopifyShop class requires an authorized access token or private application password to access the Shopify API. The easiest way to obtain this is to create and authorize a private app for your Shopify store. You can find instructions for this process on Shopify's website.

shopifyr currently does not implement OAuth authentication, however you may use a permanent access token obtained via an OAuth authentication as the password when initializing a ShopifyShop object.

charliebone/shopifyr documentation built on Aug. 12, 2019, 7:35 p.m.