Simplify creation of a Storefront API client

[davidhousedev]

Overview

Currently it is very easy to use authenticate.admin to retrieve a GraphQL Admin API client. However, it is not straightforward to take the access token provided through admin authentication token exchange and use it to make Storefront API requests.

It would be quite nice to have storefront returned from authenticate.admin already provisioned with the access token for private (i.e. server-to-server) Storefront api requests.

[lizkenyon]

Thanks for the flag!

I was wondering if you could share the business use case, what problem you are trying to solve? And why you need the storefront API. That will help us better prioritize this work?

[davidhousedev]

Thanks @liz! I don't have a compelling business case at the moment. I stumbled upon this gap in some prototyping work that uses the Storefront API to create a cart on behalf of a subscribing customer. The Storefront API usage in the context of the Remix backend is for internal demo purposes, at least in my project.

This gap did result in me needing to spend a few hours getting type-safe graphql queries spun up by modifying the .graphqlrc.ts file.

[lizkenyon]

If you are looking for demoing or prototyping purposed then the the Unauthenticated storefront helper may make sense to use.

const { storefront } = await unauthenticated.storefront(shop);
const response = await storefront.graphql(`{blogs(first: 10) { edges { node { id } } } }`);

Though I will add this to our backlog to review if adding to authenticate.admin