The Developer Essentials learning path gives you the knowledge and skills to start developing commerce solutions with commercetools. Three main resources are used throughout this learning path:
Documentation
commercetools comes with industry-leading
documentation. Many developers working with commercetools will constantly have the commercetools documentation open in another tab, and it becomes an integral part of the development workflow.
As such, being able to follow the
HTTP API reference documentation is necessary for developing with commercetools. For the modules in this learning path, we focus on the Customer resource. This allows you to get comfortable with one resource and not have to do too much set up work to get started.
First, take a look at how the
Customers reference page is set up, so that you can understand where to find necessary information. Each reference page has a similar structure to that of Customers.
Scrolling down a little, we find a section called Representations which has the JSON objects sent by, or received by, an API call.
Following the representations we get the various operations that are possible with that resource. Below we can see the Get Customer by ID operation, where the following useful information is presented:
- The URL for the operation.
- The scopes required in the API Client to perform the operation.
- The path parameter values which must use your own Project’s specific data.
- The query parameters.
- And the possible response codes.
Following this is an example request and response.
Scrolling down, the
Query Customers section shows the various parameters available to query the Customer resource, which we will cover in
API queries and Query Predicates.
And finally, we also have a list of all the possible update actions for that resource.
As you can see, there is a very clear and logical structure to each reference page, making working with the docs extremely efficient.
Search the documentation
Many users however will navigate via the search function. Let’s take a look at a search query.
As you can see, when we search for "customers" we have multiple options returned in the results. You can filter your search by the specific product you are working on. Pay attention to the different sections of the site. Those unfamiliar with the docs often click the first link as this is what they have learned from other search engines, but this isn’t necessarily the correct link. The reference page we have been looking at above is actually at the very bottom of the search results, so this is something to pay attention to.
Release notes
commercetools is a product that is continuously being updated, with releases pushed almost daily. How can you best stay on top of the changes to the product? By subscribing to our
release notes.
The SDKs
Finally, the other major resource that is provided for you to develop with commercetools are the
software development kits. SDKs are available for Java, TypeScript, PHP, and .NET. We will spend some time in the
Prepare your work environment module setting up an SDK, so head on over there if you’re looking to get started right away.
Alternatively, we also have a few
Postman collections you can use if you are looking for no-code API exploration.
The AI plugin
AI-assisted development can support the path from a requirement to an implementation, but the result still needs technical review. The commercetools AI plugin gives a coding agent access to implementation guidance and current API information. It complements the reference documentation and SDKs rather than replacing them.
The plugin combines two kinds of support:
- Agent Skills provide implementation patterns for common development tasks. The TypeScript for API platform Skill covers subject matter that overlaps with this learning path.
- Knowledge MCP provides access to current documentation and API schemas. It can also validate REST request shapes and GraphQL operations before you execute them.
Your requirements, business rules, security decisions, and test strategy remain your responsibility. Treat generated code as an implementation to inspect, test, and verify against the reference documentation.
Key Takeaways
- Use the reference documentation as the source of truth for API behavior.
- Use an SDK to implement requests with language-specific types and methods.
- Use the AI plugin to support implementation, then verify its output before relying on it.
Test your knowledge
The below questions can be answered by revising the Customer reference page.
Next module
Nice work on finishing the first module in the learning path! We would love to see you in the next module in the learning path. Click the card below and let's continue to learn the developer essentials for commercetools!