OrderCloud

In my previous post, I’ve shared how easy is to get your Next.js Commerce solution up and running powered by Sitecore OrderCloud®. Please have a look at the previous post before getting into this reading as this is a continuation that focuses on the development environment, the local solution setup, and the CI/CD approach.

Local solution setup

Let’s get back to our Github repo and clone it locally, then open it on Visual Studio Code.

We have our solution cloned locally, let’s open a terminal now and run npm install to install all dependency packages needed by the solution.

Vercel CLI

The Vercel’s command-line interface enables instant cloud deployment and local development.
To learn more, visit the official documentation, let’s get started now by installing the CLI:

Now we can just run “vercel link” to link our local repo with the Vercel project.

Use your Vercel credentials to login, choose your scope, and Vercel will magically recommend the proper project to link to. Veryfi all this information and proceed, if everything went good, you should see a green tick saying your project is now linked.

Now we need to get in our local all the environment variables we got created on Vercel:

*Environment Variables needed for communicating with the Sitecore OrderCloud API*

We can speed up the process of creating those variables locally by using the Vercel CLI command “vercel env pull“

You can see now that a new .env file got created and contains all the variables we need:

*environment variables locally imported*

Also, the previous step created the “vercel” folder where we can find the project.json configuration file.

Let’s test it out!

We got now everything in place, so let’s just run the app locally in develop mode by running “npm run dev“

Pum! Another unexpected exception 😦

After some analysis, I noticed there is an issue in this file (packages/commerce/src/config.cgs), while trying to build the path to the next.config file under packages:

const commerceNextConfig = importCwd(path.join(provider, 'next.config'))

I just updated with the hardcoded path and it seemed to fix the issue. Check this open issue for more details, or you can also refer to this PR that seems to be fixing the issue.

The app is now running locally in development mode and connected to Sitecore OrderCloud.

Let’s test our CI/CD

Let’s make a quick change on our project, test it locally, push it to Github and then deploy to Vercel.

So, in order to make some changes to the homepage, open and edit the pages/index.tsx file:

As you can see, I’m moving the marquee before the grid, and adding a heading text (note that you’d need to first add the import):

Here we go! As we’re running the app on development mode, we get feedback instantly, so get back to the local site in the browser and refresh it:

The marquee is now at the top and right after the heading text we added (“Sitecore OrderCloud Rocks!“).

Cool, so now that we’re fine with our local test, we commit and push to the repo…

Just verify we pushed the changes to Github

Go back to the Vercel portal and check that the build got automatically triggered 🙂

Amazing, isn’t it? Our changes are now deployed and pushed live to Vercel:

That’s it! The main reason behind this post was to show how easy is to get started with Sitecore OrderCloud, Next.js Commerce Templates, and Vercel. The starter kit gives you everything to start working with and for start learning this new technology stack as well. So don’t waste time and go try out this by yourself!

I hope you found it interesting, and see you soon with more Sitecore related stuff!

In this post, I’ll describe the steps to get a full development environment from scratch, using the Next.js Commerce template integrated with OrderCloud and deploying to Vercel.

Sitecore OrderCloud®

Sitecore OrderClooud is an API-First, headless cloud platform for B2B, B2C, and B2X commerce solutions. It powers custom e-commerce experiences, order management, and B2B marketplace applications for some of the world’s most well-known brands.

If you don’t have your account yet, go here and create one, you can sign up for free!

Vercel – Next.js Commerce

Next.js Commerce is an all-in-one React starter kit for high-performance e-commerce sites. You can clone, deploy, and fully customize with a few clicks.

Demo site at https://demo.vercel.store/es

And again, if you don’t have an account yet, go here and create one, you can sign up for free!

If you want to learn more about Next.js, don’t hesitate to go through the official documentation, it’s really good and useful.

Let’s go and get it done!

The first step is to login into Vercel and start a new project, then we just need to choose the Next.js Commerce template:

After we choose the Next.js Commerce template, we give the Git repo a name, and click on create:

You can now go and check what Vercel has created for you in the Github repo:

If you have experience developing Next.js apps, this repo would look familiar to you.

If you look at the readme file, you will see there is a demo site powered by Sitecore OrderCloud®!

Let’s get back and continue with our setup!

We have our Github repo, let’s skip the add integrations step for now and go straight to the deploy:

Build/deploy running for the first time…

Yas! your project got built and deployed to Vercel, you can now go and browse it (amazing isn’t it?)

The Commerce site is already up and running!

Setting up the Sitecore OrderCloud® integration

The site you’re browsing now already has some content, but as we are not integrating with any e-commerce platform yet, is just statically stored and generated. Let’s change that and switch our e-commerce solution to be powered by Sitecore OrderCloud®.

For doing that, go back to your Vercel project and then go to the Settings section, then click on Integrations and search for the OrderCloud by browsing the Marketplace

You would now see the Sitecore OrderCloud integration under the Commerce section:

Then click on Add Integration and choose your Personal Account as Vercel Scope. Click on continue and then select the project we just created for the OrderCloud integration.

Add the integration and then login to your Sitecore OrderCloud account.

In the next step, you’re prompted to choose your OrderCloud Marketplace. You would see that you can choose an existing one, but this time I want to create a new one “Seed new Marketplace (ID: “NEW”)“

You can see the progress and logs, yeah Vercel is creating everything on OrderCloud for you!

Get back now to your Vercel project, settings and check the Environment Variables. You can see the key values created in the previous step:

Check your Sitecore OrderCloud® Marketplace

Now, login to Sitecore OrderCloud, go to Marketplaces and you should be now able to see the newly created “Vercel Commerce“

Let’s try this out. Go to the API Console and then select “Catalogs“, click on send to make the API call, and check the results:

Copy the ID (solitary-storefront) so you can now browse categories by this Catalog ID:

Let’s browse the products now, copy the category ID (shirts) and make the request from the Products section:

Time to deploy it!

We just checked that the data is created on OrderCloud and we can easily query the API to get the results. Our Vercel integration is ready and now is time to deploy it so get our app consuming OrderCloud data.

just get back to your Vercel project, go to the deployments section, select the latest green one and redeploy it:

Uuuups! the build failed this time… That’s weird and unexpected, but let’s check logs and see what’s going on:

As I mentioned in the previous step, the OrderCloud integration created the environment variables to make the app communicate with OrderCloud.

Ok, that’s odd, it seems the “COMMERCE_PROVIDER” variable is not set properly. Let’s follow the logs recommendations and update it from “ordercloud” to “@vercel/commerce-ordercloud“. Save it and redeploy:

Yas! it seems to be good now, and the build is going good, you can also see in the logs how the site is being statically generated but making requests to the OrderCloud API this time:

You can see now our site getting data from OrderCloud!

Let’s make a quick update on OrderCloud and check changes in our storefront.

Let’s make an update on the Black Hat product. For that, go to the “Products” search for the “Black Hat” and then choose “PUT Create or update a product“. Change the price from 80 to 40, and the name to “OrderCloud Black Hat“:

We can query again to make sure the price got updated:

Get back to the site and check the updated product:

We have now our e-commerce solution deployed to Vercel, powered by Sitecore OrderCloud, and our Next.js app created on our Github repo.

In the next post, I’ll be exploring and sharing the local solution setup and the CI/CD so you can get an idea of how easy is to start building your solution with this tech stack.

I hope you found this post useful!

If you are interested in this topic, please don’t hesitate to watch the full demo example from Rob Earlam on YouTube.

Miguel Minoldo

Sitecore Solution Architect

Start your commerce solution in minutes with Vercel, Next.js Commerce template, and the new Sitecore OrderCloud® integration – Part II