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Is Shopify Open Source?

Last updated on October 1, 2022 @ 4:16 pm

Shopify is a Canadian e-commerce company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario. It is also the name of its proprietary e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems.

Shopify was founded in 2004 by Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake after attempting to open Snowdevil, an online store for snowboarding equipment. Shopify was written in Ruby on Rails by Lütke. The company reports that it has more than 1,000,000 merchants using its platform, with gross merchandise volume exceeding $55 billion USD as of February 2020.

In June 2009, Shopify launched an iPhone app that allowed merchants to manage their stores from iOS devices. The app was very well received, and was later followed by an Android app in September 2010.

PRO TIP: Shopify is not an open source platform. While you can access and edit the code for your own Shopify store, you cannot redistribute or sell that code. Additionally, Shopify’s platform is proprietary and closed off from the rest of the web. This means that if you want to use Shopify to build an online store, you will need to host your store on Shopify’s servers.

In June 2010, Shopify acquired Select Start Studios Inc., a Toronto-based mobile app development studio. The following year, Shopify launched POS (point of sale) apps for the iPad and iPod Touch.

Shopify has been open source from the very beginning. All of the platform’s core features are available to anyone who wants to use them. That’s one of the reasons why the platform is so popular with developers and why there’s such a large ecosystem of apps and integrations built around it.

Yes, Shopify is open source.

Drew Clemente

Drew Clemente

Devops & Sysadmin engineer. I basically build infrastructure online.