Managing app configuration files

After you've finished this tutorial, you'll understand:

• How to install Shopify CLI
• How to configure and manage Shopify apps from your terminal or IDE
• How to safely test and update your app configuration

• You've created a Partner account
• You've created a development store
• You've installed Node.js 16 or higher

Shopify CLI is a command-line interface tool that helps you build Shopify apps. It’s managed as a set of Node.js packages:

• @shopify/cli
• @shopify/app

To enable a consistent development experience across environments, these packages should be added as dependencies of your app. If you can't add them as project-level dependencies, you can install Shopify CLI globally.

Or to install globally:

You can create, link, and configure Shopify apps directly from your preferred terminal or IDE using Shopify CLI. You can either create a new Shopify app or link to any existing apps. This generates a configuration file in the root directory of your app.

You can use your configuration file to view and modify your app’s configuration on Shopify. After you've made changes to your configuration file, you can run one of the following commands to push your changes up to Shopify, where they will go live immediately.

Learn more about the configuration file format.

After your app has been installed on a live store, avoid doing active development against it so that end-users are not affected by possible breaking changes. Shopify CLI makes this easy by allowing you to link multiple Shopify apps to your codebase, so that you can dedicate specific apps and their configurations for various development, staging, and production workflows.

Use shopify app config link to generate additional configuration files for development or staging apps. You can also re-link upstream Shopify apps if your configuration file gets deleted, corrupted, or out-of-sync. If you already have a shopify.app.toml in your root directory, then you’ll be prompted to give your configuration file a name, and a file shopify.app.{your-config-name}.toml is generated in your root directory. Learn more about configuration names.

When you link to a Shopify app, it becomes your default configuration. This means that when you run shopify app dev or other commands that reference a configuration file, your default configuration is selected. If you’d like to change your default configuration, then you can run shopify app config use and pass in either your configuration name, or the file name:

You can also override your default configuration by passing a --config flag to your command. This syntax can be used to leverage CLI behavior in scripts, CI/CD, or other automated processes:

Using different configuration files is a great way to quickly and safely test functionality across multiple apps and stores as your app grows in complexity.

Shopify configuration files make it easy to push and manage changes across development, staging, and production apps. After your configuration changes have been tested, you can copy and paste your blocks of configuration to any of your other configuration files, and push those changes up with shopify app config push --config {your_config}.