Vendure Overview

Read this page to gain a high-level understanding of Vendure and concepts you will need to know to build your application.

Architecture

Vendure is a headless e-commerce platform. By "headless" we mean that it exposes all of its functionality via APIs. Specifically, Vendure features two GraphQL APIs: one for storefronts (Shop API) and the other for administrative functions (Admin API).

These are the major parts of a Vendure application:

Server: The Vendure server is the part that handles requests coming in to the GraphQL APIs. It serves both the Shop API and Admin API, and can send jobs to the Job Queue to be processed by the Worker.
Worker: The Worker runs in the background and deals with tasks such as updating the search index, sending emails, and other tasks which may be long-running, resource-intensive or require retries.
Dashboard: The Dashboard is how shop administrators manage orders, customers, products, settings and so on. The Dashboard can be further extended to support custom functionality, as detailed in the Extending the Dashboard section
Storefront: With headless commerce, you are free to implement your storefront exactly as you see fit, unconstrained by the back-end, using any technologies that you like. To make this process easier, we have created a number of storefront starter kits, as well as guides on building a storefront.

Technology stack

Vendure is built on the following open-source technologies:

SQL Database: Vendure requires an SQL database compatible with TypeORM. Officially we support PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB and SQLite but Vendure can also be used with API-compatible variants such Amazon Aurora, CockroachDB, or PlanetScale.
TypeScript & Node.js: Vendure is written in TypeScript and runs on Node.js.
NestJS: The underlying framework is NestJS, which is a full-featured application development framework for Node.js. Building on NestJS means that Vendure benefits from the well-defined structure and rich feature-set and ecosystem that NestJS provides.

Architecture

These are the major parts of a Vendure application:

Server: The Vendure server is the part that handles requests coming in to the GraphQL APIs. It serves both the Shop API and Admin API, and can send jobs to the Job Queue to be processed by the Worker.

Worker: The Worker runs in the background and deals with tasks such as updating the search index, sending emails, and other tasks which may be long-running, resource-intensive or require retries.

Dashboard: The Dashboard is how shop administrators manage orders, customers, products, settings and so on. The Dashboard can be further extended to support custom functionality, as detailed in the Extending the Dashboard section

Storefront: With headless commerce, you are free to implement your storefront exactly as you see fit, unconstrained by the back-end, using any technologies that you like. To make this process easier, we have created a number of storefront starter kits, as well as guides on building a storefront.

Technology stack

Vendure is built on the following open-source technologies:

SQL Database: Vendure requires an SQL database compatible with TypeORM. Officially we support PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB and SQLite but Vendure can also be used with API-compatible variants such Amazon Aurora, CockroachDB, or PlanetScale.

TypeScript & Node.js: Vendure is written in TypeScript and runs on Node.js.

NestJS: The underlying framework is NestJS, which is a full-featured application development framework for Node.js. Building on NestJS means that Vendure benefits from the well-defined structure and rich feature-set and ecosystem that NestJS provides.

Vendure Overview

Architecture

Technology stack

Vendure Overview

Architecture

Technology stack

Design principles