Getting started, please help

I have watched numerous tutorials online, read the documentation and more, but i need a helping hand.

I am a developer who works at a company that wants to create Shopware shops for clients. We come from building WooCommerce shops.

Basically, we want to make awesome custom shops. So i looked at how to create themes and how to install shopware locally. However, it just doesn’t click yet.

There are many ways to install Shopware 6. I tried the manual installation using this link: Installation overview - Shopware Developer. But i also tried the installation wizard using the downloaded community edition from this link Shopware - Editions and Pricing | Shopware.

Now i don’t really understand, when to use which installation method? It just doesn’t make sense to me. Do these methods have the same results? The wizard seems to be the most easy installation.

Where would we start when wanting to create custom shops? Please send help… :wink:

Hi,

for development of themes and plugins check out dockware - the simple way to develop and explore Shopware 6 locally.

For production there’s no ready thing. As with all PHP software powered by MySQL, a managed host will often do. But you can also cook up some Docker setup. It’s quite an effort. If you take the Docker route, I recommend not using the official php image, where PHP extensions must be compiled by hand. You’ll spend hours finding the correct compilation invocations.

Dunno if Dockware can be bent for production.

I recommend treating the Shopware directory as state. It should be empty in the Docker image. Let the user upload the ZIP file, extract and run the convenient installation wizard. Updating should be done via the update wizard built in to Shopware. It’s way more hassle to prepopulate the Shopware directory and devise some cunning update mechanism (although you might want to if you want to avoid having to purchase Shopware subscription, because the built in update wizard is not available in Community Edition).

Thanks for the response! Another question, what is the best way to deploy from local development to production? Should i do this with CI/CD? Or can i also make production code changes?