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: