packingslipper

PackingSlipper

PackingSlipper is a command-line tool for creating a PDF packing slip from a Shopify order.

You probably want to use Shopify's instructions for creating custom CSS for your packing slips instead of using this. I used my own custom CSS for years so that I could print packing slips on 2x7 Dymo labels (which I have way too many of since I started using a 4x6 label printer), but it seems to have started creating page breaks in the PDFs that it creates. So I made this. It creates a single packing slip based on the most recent order, by default.

Installing

1. Get Go
2. Run go install github.com/rahji/packingslipper@latest

I would normally create binaries so you can download and run it without installing Go, but I don't expect anyone to use this. And if they do, they'll likely want to change something in the code. This was really made just to solve my specific problem

Configuration

You'll need to create a Shopify Custom App for your store and give it permission to view orders. Note the API token that you are given.

Secrets

The secrets configuration for this project is a bit overkill, but the whole thing is really a learning exercise anyway.

SOPS is a pretty simple tool for encrypting the values in configuration files. The file is still readable after being encrypted and while the values will be encrypted, the keys are not. One of the cool things about SOPS is that you can use any number of encryption methods on the same file and only one of them has to succeeed when you're decrypting. Another interesting feature is that the file is self-specifying: everything that's needed to know how the file was encrypted is in the file itself. I usually use age encryption, which is a modern PGP alternative. To decrypt the config files in Go, I tried the go.mozilla.org/sops/v3/decrypt package, which you should definitely not use. Instead, I use the github.com/getsops/sops/v3/decrypt package.

Anyway, the secrets for this program are the token from above and your Shopify shop name (as shown at the beginning of your Shopify admin site URL). These secrets are stored in an encrypted YAML file. Create the YAML file and encrypt it using SOPS. You'll probably need to install SOPS first. And if you want to use Age for the encryption, as I did, you'll need to install Age and generate a key pair:

mkdir -p ~/.config/sops/age
age-keygen -o ~/.config/sops/age/keys.txt
chmod 700 ~/.config/sops/age/keys.txt

Note: If you store your key file in a non-standard directory then you'll want to set an environment variable with its location: export SOPS_AGE_KEY_FILE=/path/to/your/age-key.txt

Create a .sops.yaml file, so SOPS knows what your Age public key is. (It was shown to you by age-keygen.)

creation_rules:
  - age: >-
      YOUR_PUBLIC_AGE_KEY

Create an unencrypted file called secrets.enc.yaml:

api:
  token: "shpat_..."
  shop: "your-shop-name"

Then encrypt it, in place: sops -e -i secrets.enc.yaml

Other Config

Edit the included configuration.yaml file, according to your needs.

Usage

Open your terminal application and type packingslipper

The program accepts these flags:

Issues

Because of the font that I am using, addresses with characters from other languages are not going to work. I tried fonts that provide those character sets, but then I went down a rathole of having the program make a guess at the language and substitute the correct font. Unfortunately, it seems as though it's not so easy to correctly determine whether text is Chinese or Japanese (which seems insane to me).