# Prerequisites

https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/sanity-and-shopify-with-hydrogen/hydrogen-prerequisites.md

Sanity Studio is the only CMS to be Shopify Plus Certified, making it a perfect match for building e-commerce experiences. You'll connect them along with the purpose-built Hydrogen front-end framework.

[**Shopify**](https://www.shopify.com/) is the market leader for managing online stores, offering options to create websites using their templating language, "Liquid,” or headless with their APIs. This module will leverage the latter.

[**Hydrogen**](https://hydrogen.shopify.dev/) is a front end framework maintained by Shopify and built on [React Router 7](https://reactrouter.com/) (formerly known as [Remix 2](https://remix.run/)). It powers modern applications and websites with fine-grained controls over data fetching, caching, and delivery. It was designed for headless e-commerce websites.

[**Sanity Studio**](https://www.sanity.io/studio) is the primary content management system for the [Sanity Content Operating System](https://www.sanity.io/). The admin dashboard your content operators will use to embellish raw product details with rich descriptions and connected media to tell more complete stories.

[**Sanity Connect**](https://www.sanity.io/docs/sanity-connect-for-shopify) is a Shopify application to link your Shopify store to your Sanity project. Product changes are instantly written to Sanity, so you are always working with the most up-to-date content, thanks to Sanity’s real-time APIs.

## Prerequisites

The following assumptions are made for you to be able to complete these exercises:

* You have a Shopify Partners account to create demo stores.
  * If not, sign up for free at [partners.shopify.com](https://www.shopify.com/partners)
* You have a Sanity account.
  * If not, sign up for free at [sanity.io/get-started](https://sanity.io/get-started)
* You are familiar with the **command line** for creating and running code locally.
* You are skilled with **JavaScript**. 
* You are comfortable with code snippets being written in **TypeScript**.
* You have a reasonable level of understanding of **React**. 
* You must have at least Node 20.11 installed.
* CLI commands are written for [**pnpm**](https://pnpm.io/), though you could use whichever package manager you prefer
* Firefox or Chrome (Hydrogen's development environment can be unstable in Safari)

### Create a Shopify development store

Your first task is to log in to your Shopify Partners dashboard and create a development store to use through this module.

1. Create a free **Shopify** development store in the [Shopify Partners](https://www.shopify.com/partners) dashboard.

![Shopify Partners dashboard with "create development store" highlighted](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/3do82whm/next/4e1325720e91f1d3f48ea2b1be7464bc7b81ac17-2144x1388.png)

Your store can have any name.

* In "Purpose," select **"Create a store"** to test and build**.**
* The store can have any available name.
* In "Build version," select **"Current release."**
* In "Data and **configurations," select "Start with an empty store,"** as you'll import test data in a later exercise.

### Alternatives

* If you don’t need an e-commerce store, you may prefer to complete the [Day one content operations](https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/day-one-with-sanity-studio) module, which also looks at setting up Sanity Studio with a Next.js or Remix front-end.
* If you already have a Sanity Studio and want to make it even better, look at the [Studio excellence](https://www.sanity.io/learn/course/studio-excellence) module. This Shopify-specific module will use a Studio template with an existing schema.
* While this module deals exclusively with Shopify, the patterns displayed could be adapted to other e-commerce providers. 

## Ready? 

Let’s begin by setting up Sanity Studio!