TechPrufer
Sign inGet started

Blogs›Shopify›API Versioning and Breaking Change Management

API Versioning and Breaking Change Management

API Versioning and Breaking Change Management

1
posts
2019

Shopify has established a robust API versioning strategy to ensure stability and predictability for its partners. This involves releasing new API versions quarterly with date-based names (e.g., 2020-01). The platform team builds the infrastructure and tooling to enforce this strategy, which includes managing breaking and non-breaking changes. Breaking changes require thorough impact analysis and stakeholder agreement, while non-breaking changes are tested for forward compatibility. Tools like `ApiChange.in_effect?`, `mark_breaking`, and `mark_possibly_breaking` are used to track changes, measure their impact, and manage adoption across the ecosystem. This system aims to build trust by respecting the impact of API decisions on third-party developers and merchants.

2019

How Shopify Manages API Versioning and Breaking Changes - Shopify

12/17/2019

This post details Shopify's API versioning strategy, introducing date-based version names (e.g., 2020-01) released quarterly. It outlines the process for managing breaking and non-breaking changes, including impact analysis for breaking changes and forward compatibility testing for non-breaking changes. The post introduces internal tooling like `ApiChange.in_effect?`, `mark_breaking`, and `mark_possibly_breaking` to track changes, measure their impact on API consumers, and manage adoption. The core principle is to break API contracts only when necessary and with predictable timelines for ecosystem partners.