Send analytics in background

[gonzaloriestra]

WHY are these changes introduced?

HackDays project: https://vault.shopify.io/hackdays/154/projects/24279-Shopify-CLI-UX-improvements

Analytics delivery currently blocks command completion, adding noticeable latency to every CLI invocation.

WHAT is this pull request doing?

Writes the completed analytics payload to a temporary file and sends it from a detached internal command, allowing the original command to exit immediately.

This works for Mac and Linux, but on Windows we still have to wait for the process because of a known issue. We also wait on CI to avoid issues with the job teardown.

Benchmark for shopify version:

Version	Average time (10 runs)
4.5.0	1.352s
snapshot	0.248s

demo.mp4

How to test your changes?

• pnpm i -g @shopify/cli@0.0.0-snapshot-20260727091503
• shopify version --verbose

Checklist

• I've considered possible cross-platform impacts (Mac, Linux, Windows)
• I've considered possible documentation changes
• I've considered analytics changes to measure impact
• The change is user-facing — I've identified the correct bump type (patch for bug fixes · minor for new features · major for breaking changes) and added a changeset with pnpm changeset add

[gonzaloriestra]

/snapit

[github-actions]

This PR seems inactive. If it's still relevant, please add a comment saying so. Otherwise, take no action.
→ If there's no activity within a week, then a bot will automatically close this.
Thanks for helping to improve Shopify's dev tooling and experience.

[gonzaloriestra]

• New app dev layout with filters #8137
• New loading indicator #8136
• Add mouse support #8131
• Send analytics in background #7615 👈 (View in Graphite)
• main

This stack of pull requests is managed by Graphite. Learn more about stacking.

[gonzaloriestra]

/snapit

[gonzaloriestra]

/snapit

[github-actions]

🫰✨ Thanks @gonzaloriestra! Your snapshot has been published to npm.

Test the snapshot by installing your package globally:

pnpm i -g --@shopify:registry=https://registry.npmjs.org @shopify/cli@0.0.0-snapshot-20260727091503

Caution

After installing, validate the version by running shopify version in your terminal.
If the versions don't match, you might have multiple global instances installed.
Use which shopify to find out which one you are running and uninstall it.

[isaacroldan]

this is writing sensitive data to a file... there is a small posibility that the clenaup fails, or the send-analytics invocation fails... something fails and this file is never deleted.
What can we do to prevent that? 🤔

[gonzaloriestra]

In theory we delete even on failure paths.

But if that fails, we are reducing the risk by:
- Creating the file in the tmp folder, that should eventually be removed
- Setting the file permissions so that only the user running the CLI can access it (0600)
- Using a random filename

Do you think it's enough? Alternatively, we could try to encrypt or pass the data in a different way.

[gonzaloriestra]

Another option is to clean all the CLI payloads after every run (or old ones at least)

[isaacroldan]

um, cleaning all files wouldn't be compatible with multiple CLIs running in different terminals (one might delete another's file).

maybe ask Claude/Codex if there is reliable way to encrypt? if not I guess there isn't much we can do

[gonzaloriestra]

Yeah, that's why I suggested to only remove the old ones.

Encrypting looks complex because we need to keep a key somehow. But let me try by passing the data through stdin instead.

[github-actions]

Differences in type declarations

We detected differences in the type declarations generated by Typescript for this branch compared to the baseline ('main' branch). Please, review them to ensure they are backward-compatible. Here are some important things to keep in mind:

• Some seemingly private modules might be re-exported through public modules.
• If the branch is behind main you might see odd diffs, rebase main into this branch.

New type declarations

We found no new type declarations in this PR

Existing type declarations

packages/cli-kit/dist/private/node/otel-metrics.d.ts

@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ import { OtelService } from '../../public/node/vendor/otel-js/service/types.js';
 import { DefaultOtelServiceOptions } from '../../public/node/vendor/otel-js/service/DefaultOtelService/DefaultOtelService.js';
 type MetricRecorder = 'console' | {
     type: 'otel';
-    otel: Pick<OtelService, 'record'>;
+    otel: Pick<OtelService, 'getMeterProvider' | 'record'>;
 };
 interface Timing {
     active: number;

packages/cli-kit/dist/public/node/analytics.d.ts

@@ -6,6 +6,7 @@ interface ReportAnalyticsEventOptions {
     errorMessage?: string;
     exitMode: CommandExitMode;
 }
+export declare function sendAnalyticsEventFromStdin(): Promise<void>;
 /**
  * Report an analytics event, sending it off to Monorail -- Shopify's internal analytics service.
  *

packages/cli-kit/dist/public/node/fs.d.ts

@@ -86,6 +86,8 @@ export declare function appendFile(path: string, content: string): Promise<void>
 export declare function appendFileSync(path: string, data: string): void;
 export interface WriteOptions {
     encoding: BufferEncoding;
+    mode?: number;
+    flag?: string;
 }
 /**
  * Writes content to file at path.

packages/cli-kit/dist/public/node/vendor/otel-js/service/types.d.ts

@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
-import type { Counter, Histogram, MeterProvider, MetricAttributes, MetricOptions, UpDownCounter } from '@opentelemetry/api';
-import type { ViewOptions } from '@opentelemetry/sdk-metrics';
+import type { Counter, Histogram, MetricAttributes, MetricOptions, UpDownCounter } from '@opentelemetry/api';
+import type { MeterProvider, ViewOptions } from '@opentelemetry/sdk-metrics';
 export type CustomMetricLabels<TLabels extends Record<TKeys, MetricAttributes>, TKeys extends string = keyof TLabels & string> = {
     [P in TKeys]: TLabels[P] extends MetricAttributes ? TLabels[P] : never;
 };