build-w-o-db.md

Building assets of administration and storefront without a database

It is common to prebuild assets in professional deployments to deploy the build artifacts assets to the production environment. This task is mostly done by a CI job which doesn't have access to the 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.

{% hint style="warning" %} This guide requires Shopware 6.4.4.0 or higher {% endhint %}

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].

To use the ComposerPluginLoader you have to create a file like bin/ci and set up the CLI application with the loader. There is an example:

#!/usr/bin/env php
<?php declare(strict_types=1);
use Composer\InstalledVersions;
use Shopware\Core\Framework\Plugin\KernelPluginLoader\ComposerPluginLoader;
use Shopware\Production\HttpKernel;
use Shopware\Production\Kernel;
use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Console\Application;
use Symfony\Component\Console\Input\ArgvInput;
use Symfony\Component\Dotenv\Dotenv;
use Symfony\Component\ErrorHandler\Debug;

set_time_limit(0);

$classLoader = require __DIR__ . '/../vendor/autoload.php';
$envFile = __DIR__ . '/../.env';

if (class_exists(Dotenv::class) && is_readable($envFile) && !is_dir($envFile)) {
    (new Dotenv())->usePutenv()->load($envFile);
}

if (!isset($_SERVER['PROJECT_ROOT'])) {
    $_SERVER['PROJECT_ROOT'] = dirname(__DIR__);
}

$input = new ArgvInput();
$env = $input->getParameterOption(['--env', '-e'], $_SERVER['APP_ENV'] ?? 'prod', true);
$debug = ($_SERVER['APP_DEBUG'] ?? ($env !== 'prod')) && !$input->hasParameterOption('--no-debug', true);

if ($debug) {
    umask(0000);
    if (class_exists(Debug::class)) {
        Debug::enable();
    }
}

$pluginLoader = new ComposerPluginLoader($classLoader, null);
$kernel = new HttpKernel($env, $debug, $classLoader);
$kernel->setPluginLoader($pluginLoader);
$application = new Application($kernel->getKernel());
$application->run($input);

We can now dump the plugins for the Administration with the new file without a database with 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, we 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 we will need to change the loader to StaticFileConfigLoader. To change that we 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.