commercetools Connect

Intent-driven guidance for building production-ready Connect applications. This skill teaches the decision frameworks, platform contracts, and best practices that survive a production-readiness review — not a single connector's code. It generalizes patterns (and warns against anti-patterns) found in real connectors, and grounds every platform fact in official docs.

Language scope: Connect applications can be written in JavaScript/TypeScript or Java (docs); the create-connect-app template supports JS and TS. This skill targets TypeScript/Node — the decision frameworks, platform contracts (timeouts, ack semantics, scopes, lifecycle), and connect.yaml guidance are language-agnostic and apply equally to a Java connector, but the code snippets and the supertest + msw test stack are Node/Express-specific.

Tooling — use the Connect CLI, don't hand-roll. Scaffold, run, and ship with the official Connect CLI (@commercetools/cli). Every CLI command, the bootstrap flow, and the pinned dependency versions live in one place: the Connect CLI reference (connect-cli.md). Merchant Center custom applications/views are the exception: they use a separate frontend toolchain (@commercetools-frontend/*) and only ride the Connect CLI at deploy time and directory structure — see merchant-center-cli.md and merchant-center-customizations.md.

Workflow

When this skill is invoked, always follow these steps:

1. Docs search (required, run first) — The first time you use this skill in a session you must run this before answering. It gathers the latest verified documentation as your primary grounding, filtered to the products this skill covers. Use this script for documentation search while working with this skill; the Knowledge MCP covers everything else. Always confirm details against retrieved documentation rather than the skill text alone: