Building assets of Administration and Storefront without a Database

It is common to prebuild assets in professional deployments to deploy the build artifact assets to the production environment. This task is mostly done by a CI job that doesn't have access to the production database. Shopware needs access to the database to look up the installed extensions/load the configured theme variables. To be able to build the assets without a database, we can use static dumped files.

WARNING

This guide requires Shopware 6.4.4.0 or higher

Compiling the Administration without database

By default, Shopware builds the Administration without extensions if there is no database connection. To include the extensions without a database, you will need to use the ComposerPluginLoader. This determines the used plugins by looking up the installed project dependencies. To get this working, the plugin needs to be required in the system using composer req [package/name].

There is a file bin/ci which uses the ComposerPluginLoader and can be used instead of bin/console. Using this, you can dump the plugins for the Administration with the new file without a database using the command bin/ci bundle:dump. It is recommended to call bin/ci instead of bin/console in the bin/*.js scripts, which can be achieved by setting the environment variable CI=1.

Compiling the Storefront without database

To compile the Storefront theme, you will need the theme variables from the database. To allow compiling it without a database, it is possible to dump the variables to the private file system of Shopware. This file system interacts with the local folder files by default, but to compile it, it should be shared such that settings are shared across deployments. This can be achieved, for example, by using a storage adapter like s3. The configuration can be dumped using the command bin/console theme:dump, or it happens automatically when changing theme settings or assigning a new theme.

By default, Shopware still tries to load configurations from the database. In the next step, you will need to change the loader to StaticFileConfigLoader. To change that, you will need to create a new file, config/packages/storefront.yaml with the following content:

storefront:
   theme:
       config_loader_id: Shopware\Storefront\Theme\ConfigLoader\StaticFileConfigLoader
       available_theme_provider: Shopware\Storefront\Theme\ConfigLoader\StaticFileAvailableThemeProvider

This will force the theme compiler to use the static dumped file instead of looking into the database.

Partially compiling the Storefront

You can also build just the Javascript bundle using CI=1 SHOPWARE_SKIP_THEME_COMPILE=true PUPPETEER_SKIP_CHROMIUM_DOWNLOAD=true bin/build-storefront.sh (without the need for the above loader) in your CI. After that, run bin/console theme:dump on your production system when the database is available. This will happen automatically if theme variables are changed via the admin panel.