Can I host a full non-Shopify web app on Shopify?

Question

Currently, I have a separate web app and Shopify site. The separate web app is on its own domain and it links to items on the Shopify site. The front-end for the separate web app is vanilla HTML, vanilla CSS and vanilla JavaScript. And the back-end for the separate web app is PHP and MySQL.

We want to move the separate web app onto the Shopify site/domain. Is it possible to build a custom web app with Shopify? I know that you can do some sort of Rails liquid template coding for Shopify, but are there limitations? What about the back-end, would I just have to make REST API calls or can I use SQL database tables?

Either way it seems like I'd have to rewrite most of the app.

Answer 1

You are free to make a Shopify store your own web app, but you will be using Javascript to do so and not PHP/MySQL. The reason is that JS is functionaly part of the web browser whereas your solution is not.

You can inject content to a normal Shopify theme template that potentially uses a PHP/MySQL App, but note that that is going to always be slow due to architecting how those kinds of apps interface.