How the Mall Open‑Source E‑Commerce Project Grew to 40K Stars

Recent Status

On GitHub's Java Topic ranking, the mall project is currently ranked 9th, and many developers have already noticed it. Repository: https://github.com/topics/java

Development History

Initial 20K+ Stars

The author started the mall project in early 2018 to combine business scenarios with technology, choosing an e‑commerce domain and SpringBoot as the framework. After more than a year of development, the project reached 20K stars in August 2019. An earlier article titled "My GitHub open‑source project, from 0 to 20,000 Stars!" documented that journey.

SpringCloud Series Tutorial

When the project matured, the author decided to refactor mall into a microservices architecture using Spring Cloud, the de‑facto standard for Java microservices. A tutorial series called springcloud-learning was created, which has earned over 2.2K stars.

mall‑swarm Microservice Project

After mastering Spring Cloud core components, the mall project was transformed into the mall‑swarm microservice version. The first version was released in December 2019. A recent major update upgraded the stack to Spring Cloud Hoxton & Alibaba, replaced Eureka and Spring Cloud Config with Nacos, and switched from Spring Security to OAuth2, forming a robust Spring Cloud technology stack.

Key Updates to mall

Deployment evolved from Docker and Docker Compose to include Jenkins for automated production deployment.

Added a self‑hosted MinIO object‑storage solution as a cost‑effective alternative to OSS.

Implemented dynamic permission management, extending both front‑end and back‑end capabilities.

Redesigned SKU handling to store flexible JSON data.

Integrated an ELK logging system with scene‑based log collection for easier production debugging.

Upgraded to SpringBoot 2.3.0, refreshing all dependent library versions.

mall‑tiny Rapid Development Scaffold

The mall‑tiny project was created as a lightweight scaffold derived from the full‑stack mall architecture, keeping only essential services such as MySQL and Redis. It includes a complete permission management module and can seamlessly integrate with the mall‑admin‑web front‑end project, turning it into a ready‑to‑use permission system.

mall‑admin‑web Front‑End Project

The mall‑admin‑web front‑end adds permission management features and can be integrated without changes into mall, mall‑swarm, and mall‑tiny, demonstrating high reusability.

mall‑learning Tutorial Project

The mall‑learning project serves as a comprehensive tutorial companion to mall, offering extensive documentation and sample code. The author continuously learns new technologies within mall‑learning and then applies them back to the main mall project, providing a practical learning loop.

Future Outlook

The mall project has evolved beyond a simple open‑source repository into its own ecosystem, the "mall series". Ongoing updates aim to make it an even better practical learning platform.

Project Addresses

mall

– E‑commerce project: https://github.com/macrozheng/mall mall‑swarm – Microservice version: https://github.com/macrozheng/mall-swarm mall‑admin‑web – Front‑end project: https://github.com/macrozheng/mall-admin-web mall‑learning – Tutorial project: https://github.com/macrozheng/mall-learning springcloud‑learning – Spring Cloud tutorials: https://github.com/macrozheng/springcloud-learning mall‑tiny – Rapid scaffold: https://github.com/macrozheng/mall-tiny

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