Developing a Private App for Shopify you can call from Postman

I wanted the ability to make labels for orders via my Shopify account. In order to do this I needed access to the orders and the Shopify API promised the ability to do just that. The problem is the documentation is massive and theres a lot of ways to do this.

For me I just needed to be able to call the API‘s from Postman. There is a way you can do this with a auth token, but getting it is not super straight forward. I was able to accomplish this but only on a developer account and not from my live site. I also had to write a node express app that calls into Shopify and returns back the auth token. It also installed my demo app to a dev account and blah blah blah... You see where I’m going with this? Way too much work for something that seemed so simple.

Then I noticed a small link at the bottom of the screen under the Apps Menu. “Manage private apps”

Clicking that link opened up everything I needed in order to call API’s freely and access all the data I needed. Once you click that link you can Create a new private app.

Once you do that you will be able to grant access to the developer (you) and all the roles needed to do most everything.

“Show inactive Admin API permissions” and you can allow access to everything.

Once you have saved your private all you will be able to simply call all the API’s using Basic Auth

https://{apikey}:{password}@{hostname}/admin/api/{version}/{resource}.json

Best of all this allows you access to your LIVE site. Now you are free to write any application you want that calls read/write API’s such as order information, analytics, inventory, discount codes, etc.

Examples

https://aa3cgf4c2a765611c5d7c6c9aa8de:shppa_676x503716v69bd4dbb3d22e713@awesomestore.myshopify.com/admin/orders.json?status=any

This will return all the order for your store.

Caveat

There is one downside to this. Because it’s a private app you can’t sell on the Shopify app store it or make it public. So only YOU can access it, or at least you will need to gain access to the private keys to the store to call it.

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