Vendure is an open-source e-commerce framework built on Node.js, TypeScript & GraphQL. After three years of development, we are incredibly excited and proud to announce the first stable release!

Why Vendure?

Just over three years ago, I found myself researching the e-commerce ecosystem. My family runs a successful art materials retailer with a website I had built from scratch well over a decade ago, having taught myself PHP and MySQL from one of those 5-inch-thick books that come with a CD-ROM in the back cover. Foolish? Perhaps! Back then there were few alternatives anyway.

But the time had come to find a better solution. In the intervening years, the choice of e-commerce frameworks has improved in both number and quality. We have the established, mature players like Magento, WooCommerce, Spree Commerce & Shopware as well as newer challengers list Sylius & Saleor. All worthy solutions - but here’s what was missing:

• TypeScript / Node.js
• The majority of solutions are PHP-based. There was very little out there for the huge community of JavaScript/TypeScript/Node.js developers. A massive pool of expertise untapped.
• Headless
• “Headless” means “API-driven”. I had spent the prior three years working on a headless CMS project, and I was sold on the benefits of this architecture.
• Great developer experience
• Hours were spent attempting to set up a dev environment to test out these frameworks. I wanted something simple to set up, and simple to extend. I don’t want to dig through layers of config and abstractions in order to add a new attribute to my product model.

So once again, I foolishly decided to build my own.

#vendure #node #typescript #graphql