Shopify Themes: Local Development & Version Control
- PublishedMarch 5, 2020
- Length1 Minute
- CategoryTutorials
This is the first in a series of posts for developers getting started building Shopify themes. In this post, we'll review local theme development and git version control.
About the Author
Dan is a front end engineer working on design systems. Previous roles include: Huge, Cvent, Gifn, and PRPL. For more information, see here.
Table of Contents
Questions & Comments
If you have feedback, view this post on GitHub and create an issue or open a pull request with edits. Thanks for reading!
Shopify Theme Series
- Part 1: Local Development & Version Control
- Part 2: Automated Deployments with GitHub Actions (coming soon)
Environment Setup
Before we can get started, you'll need a few things in order to follow along:
- A GitHub account with an SSH key configured to store our theme.
- A Shopify Partner Program account with access to your desired Store/theme so we can grant API permissions to sync our local work with the remote server.
- One of Homebrew or Chocolatey package managers. If you're a Mac user like myself, Homebrew should be preinstalled and available in Terminal.
Shopify Theme CLI
Installation
Shopify has a number of tools to support different developer workflows. For theme development, we will need at least the Shopify Theme Kit CLI installed and authenticated.
Follow the instructions here to install the CLI (themekit) and any supporting libraries (shopify/shopify).
Once complete, running the theme --help command should print a message like the following:
1$ theme --help2Theme Kit is a tool kit for manipulating shopify themes34Theme Kit is a fast and cross platform tool that enables you to build shopify themes with ease.56Complete documentation is available at https://shopify.github.io/themekit/