Saleor

Saleor is an enterprise-ready, API-first commerce platform designed for engineering teams that need a flexible, headless architecture. By focusing on scalability and avoiding vendor lock-in, Saleor allows businesses to create custom e-commerce experiences without relying on monolithic setups.

Why Choose a Headless Architecture?

A headless commerce platform completely separates the backend e-commerce logic from the frontend presentation layer. Saleor is a headless and API-only commerce platform, which means APIs are the exclusive way to configure or extend the backend. Rather than enforcing a specific templating engine or frontend technology, Saleor is designed around GraphQL, avoiding the fragmentation that comes from mixed API styles.

Using an API-first approach, Saleor allows you to seamlessly integrate any frontend framework, whether it is React, Vue, Next.js, or a dedicated mobile application. For global brands operating across regions, the platform provides a native multi-channel approach, enabling businesses to control stock, products, and currencies on a per-channel basis. Furthermore, the platform's extension mechanisms include webhooks, apps, and metadata, giving developers the tools they need to shape the checkout experience, process events asynchronously, and integrate with third-party tools like ERP or PIM systems.

Initializing the Platform

To simplify local development and deployment testing, Saleor provides a dedicated platform repository containing a complete Docker orchestration setup. Using Docker, you can run all components of Saleor locally by pulling the images and running docker compose up.

Begin by cloning the platform repository and pulling the necessary Docker images to your local machine:

Before you can start interacting with the local instance, Saleor requires applying database migrations before you can start using the local development setup. This ensures that your PostgreSQL database has the correct schema required by the current version of the API.

Once the migrations are successfully complete, you can optionally populate your database with sample data. This step is particularly useful for quickly exploring the dashboard's features without manually creating products, variants, and categories from scratch. Finally, you will need to create an administrator account to securely access the dashboard.

Managing Operations via the Dashboard

With the backend fully configured and the initial superuser created, you can launch the entire local environment. The intuitive Saleor dashboard provides direct access to product management, advanced order processing, and multi-channel configuration. Because the platform relies solely on its GraphQL API, every action taken in the dashboard accurately reflects what developers can programmatically accomplish.