Shopify CLI for themes

Shopify CLI accelerates your theme development process with the following features:

• Safely preview, test, and share changes to themes using development themes
• Hot reload CSS and section changes, or automatically refresh a page on file change, when previewing a theme
• Initialize a new theme using Dawn as a starting point
• Push and publish themes from the command line
• Work on multiple themes using environments
• Run Theme Check on your theme

Development themes are temporary, hidden themes that are connected to the Shopify store that you're using for development. When you connect your theme to a store as a development theme, you can use that store's data for local testing.

You can create a development theme using the shopify theme dev command.

You can use development themes on a Shopify store or a development store. Development themes don't count toward your theme limit, and are deleted from the store after seven days of inactivity.

Your development theme is deleted when you run shopify auth logout. If you want a preview link for the theme that can be accessed after you log out, then you should push your development theme to an unpublished theme on your store.

Your development theme can be used to perform the following tasks:

• View changes in real time to a theme that you're developing locally
• Customize and interact with the theme using the Shopify admin theme editor
• Share a password-protected preview of the theme with other developers

Many command configurations, such as the theme and store to be used with the command, are passed using flags. To avoid passing multiple flags with each command, and to easily switch projects or contexts, you can use environments. Environments are sets of command configurations that can be referenced by name using a single --environment flag.

You might want to use environments in the following cases:

• You need to switch between development stores frequently.
• You access multiple stores using Theme Access passwords.
• You want to deploy your project to development, staging, and production instances of your theme.

Learn how to configure and use environments.

To learn how to install Shopify CLI on Windows, macOS, or Linux, refer to Install Shopify CLI.

Refer to the following tutorials for details about creating or working on a Shopify theme using Shopify CLI:

Start building a theme

Learn how to set up your theme development environment and create a new theme.

Customize an existing theme

Learn how to set up your development environment to work on a theme in a Shopify store.

Refer to the Shopify CLI theme command reference to explore the commands available to build themes with Shopify CLI.

As a theme developer, you might want to use a Shopify store to test your theme, or to share your theme with stakeholders. You also might need to work on multiple stores, or use a different set of credentials to authenticate with a particular store. Learn about the authentication methods that you can use to work on stores using Shopify CLI, and how to switch between accounts and stores.

You can use the following authentication methods to work on a theme in a Shopify store using Shopify CLI:

• Log in with a Shopify account
• Provide a Theme Access password
• Provide a custom app access token

You can use the following types of Shopify accounts to access the store you want to work on:

• A collaborator account with the Manage themes permission
• A staff account with the Themes permission
• The store owner account

To authenticate with a Shopify account, run a command that requires store access. You'll be prompted to log in.

If you need to switch between accounts, then log out of the current account using the following command:

The next time you enter a command that requires authentication, you'll be prompted to log in, and can enter a new set of credentials.

You can use a Theme Access password to authenticate with the store that you want to work on. Theme Access passwords are generated for a store using the Theme Access app.

To use a Theme Access password, pass the --password flag with each command that you want to run against the store. If you run a command without the --password flag, then Shopify CLI attempts to use your Shopify account credentials to run the command.

You can use a custom app access token to authenticate with the store that you want to work on.

To authenticate using an access token, pass the --password flag with each command that you want to run against the store. If you run a command without the --password flag, then Shopify CLI attempts to use your Shopify account credentials to run the command.

Your custom app needs to have the read_themes and write_themes API access scopes. To enable hot reloading, you also need to add the unauthenticated_read_content access scope for Storefront API integration, and pass the tokens as environment variables instead of using the --password flag.

The first time you enter a command that requires you to interact with a Shopify store, pass the --store flag with the command and specify the store that you want to interact with:

The store that you specify is used for future commands until a new store is specified.

If you want to change the store that you're interacting with, pass the --store flag with your command, specifying the new store that you want to interact with.

To check which store you're using, run shopify theme info:

You can run certain theme commands, such as shopify theme dev, only if the directory you're using matches the default Shopify theme directory structure. This structure represents a buildless theme, or a theme that has already gone through any necessary file transformations. If you use build tools to generate theme files, then you might need to run commands from the directory where the generated files are stored.

The default Shopify theme directory structure is as follows:

If you have files in the same repository as your theme that you don't want to interact with using Shopify CLI, then you can add them to a .shopifyignore at the root of the theme.

.shopifyignore accepts references to files in the following formats:

• Simple file names: templates/product.temp.json
• Wildcards: config/*_secret.json, *.jpg
• Regular expressions: /\.(txt|gif|bat)$/

You can also exclude specific files or patterns during a push or pull using the --ignore flag. If files are excluded using .shopifyignore, then both the contents of .shopifyignore and the --ignore flag are respected.

If you have a theme that you want to work with programmatically, then you can integrate Shopify CLI into your CI/CD pipeline to perform actions like pushing, pulling, and publishing a theme.

Learn more about running Shopify CLI in a CI/CD pipeline.

To upgrade Shopify CLI 3.x to the latest version, run the upgrade command from your theme directory:

To check your CLI version, run the version command from your theme directory:

In October 2022, support for themes was added to Shopify CLI 3.x. Shopify CLI 3.x provides a streamlined authentication and store management experience.

To learn about the differences between Shopify CLI 2.x and 3.x, how to upgrade to Shopify CLI 3.x, or how to use both Shopify CLI 2.x and 3.x on the same machine, refer to Migrate to Shopify CLI 3.x.

Anonymous usage statistics are collected by default. To opt out, you can use the environment variable SHOPIFY_CLI_NO_ANALYTICS=1.

Shopify CLI is open source. Learn how to contribute to our GitHub repository.

• Open a GitHub issue - To report bugs or request new features, open an issue in the Shopify CLI repository.
• .dev Community - Visit our forums to connect with the community and learn more about Shopify CLI development.