Show HN: Rapidez – Headless Magento with Laravel and InstantSearch

I've been working with Magento for years, but for side projects I used CodeIgniter. When Laravel was released, I switched and thought: It would be nice to create a Magento shop within the Laravel ecosystem!

So, in 2020, I created a proof of concept: some Laravel models on top of the Magento database, with a frontend using Laravel Blade templates and some basic styling with Tailwind CSS. The result compared to Magento? Super fast product pages!

Next up: category pages. These need filtering, sorting, etc. preferably without page refreshes. Magento requires Elasticsearch (since 2.4.8, only OpenSearch), so it would be nice if we could use that for product listings. We found ReactiveSearch, a frontend library with search components. We implemented that for super fast filtering and searching. Recently, with Rapidez v4, we switched to InstantSearch (from Algolia) with Searchkit, so we can still use Elasticsearch/OpenSearch since there wasn't much activity on the ReactiveSearch repos and we ran into some issues with it.

But visitors also need to log in, add products to the cart, check out, etc. GraphQL support in Magento wasn't as mature back then, so we started by using the Magento API with some renderless Vue components: logic only in the Vue files, while templates stayed in Blade. As GraphQL support improved, we switched to GraphQL for the cart in Rapidez v2, and for the entire checkout in v3.

Now, 5 years later: 2000+ commits, 250+ releases, 50+ packages, and 10+ live showcases.

But best of all: it's free and open source!

- Website: https://rapidez.io - Demo: https://demo.rapidez.io - Docs: https://docs.rapidez.io