Introduction
I'm glad you're here. :) –Isaac
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I'm glad you're here. :) –Isaac
Last updated
Was this helpful?
Mechanic is a Shopify development and automation platform.
for an off-the-shelf solution
for a task that fits you perfectly
if you need something else
Mechanic is a Shopify development and automation platform, which comes with a rich – and our users write their own custom tasks every day. Let's find out if Mechanic might work for you.
Are you working on something Shopify-related?
Mechanic is only available for Shopify.
Is what you're looking for already available from ?
We have hundreds of common scenarios already handled with pre-written, open-source, modifiable, off-the-shelf tasks.
As far as your problem concerns Shopify data, is what you want to do supported by the ?
Mechanic's toolkit goes beyond Shopify's APIs, but a Mechanic task can only interact with Shopify data in ways that Shopify supports.
Are you open to ?
Whether you need a developer or already have that covered, the path to creating a custom Mechanic task is well-established.
That list wasn't exactly a formal flowchart, but we hope it's helpful as you're evaluating Mechanic for your purposes. At its best, Mechanic is a platform and toolkit that you go to, and return to, when you hit the limits of the Shopify admin. And it's a community that collectively has learned how to solve many, many kinds of problems. (Join our !)
Got a question you need answered now? 💬
A developer writes – Mechanic's term for a piece of automation. These tasks can respond to many different , like a Shopify webhook, a manual trigger, a regular interval (e.g. hourly, daily), or an incoming email. Tasks use to signal their interest in specific event types.
When a task receives an incoming event, it can choose to generate an – an operation that has an effect.
The action makes changes to a Shopify store, like tagging, publishing, creating or deleting resources. It provides direct and complete access to Shopify's admin API, with support for both REST and GraphQL.
The action is for sending email. It supports custom templates, and attachments.
The action is for uploading files to an FTP or SFTP server. These files may be generated by the task, or can be fetched from external locations.
The action performs any request, to any HTTP endpoint. This facilitates integration with third-party APIs.
The action generates a variety of file formats, including PDF, CSV, ZIP, and anything retrieved from a public URL. Files generated this way receive a temporary URL of their own, and can be fed into other tasks for further processing.
For a complete list of supported actions, see .
Mechanic makes heavy use of – a template language created by Shopify. Its primary use is in . In the same way that a Liquid theme receives browser requests and renders HTML, a Mechanic task receives events, and renders actions (by defining them with JSON).
In Mechanic, our Liquid implementation includes additional support for constructing and , and includes many useful , making data processing more efficient.
Mechanic performs work using queues of , with no limit on how large each queue can become. If there is a sudden surge of incoming events for a Shopify store, the store's dedicated Mechanic queue could become delayed. This is an important difference between Mechanic and many other systems: in a high-traffic period, Mechanic will never refuse incoming events for a store; instead, it will process each one as soon as possible, by putting them into a run queue. The rate at which Mechanic processes work varies, depending on and the .