My typical workflow with Shopify's Theme Kit

Straight up, Theme Kit is a tool used to create and party with Shopify themes, not to mention:

• Download and upload theme files from multiple environments at speeds beyond your nasty imagination
• Watch for saved changes on your computer and automatically upload ‘em to your Shopify theme
• And a bunch of other things

You may be thinking, “Why don’t you just use Shopify’s online editor?” It’s simple, really: I like to overcomplicate things and throw in a version control service for shits and gigs. For a comprehensive breakdown of Theme Kit, you can visit their websiiite. This will be a quick post on my workflow with it.

How I party with Theme Kit.

• Create a new branch with git checkout -b <feature_name>
• Mosey over to the Shopify store and duplicate the active theme and rename it to <feature_name>
• Update the config.yml file by adding a new environment to the party and <feature_name>’s Theme ID
• Download the <feature_name> theme from the Shopify store by smashing the following command in Terminal: theme download --env=<feature_name>
• Once that’s done, while still in Terminal, I’ll type theme watch --env=<feature_name> so that any edits I make and save to any files will automatically be uploaded to my <feature_name> theme to preview
• How do I preview? By hollering theme open --env=<feature_name> in Terminal

Once I’ve made all the necessary edits, I start to merge all them shits to my develop and master branches:

• First, I’ll git pull origin develop while being in the <feature_name> branch
• Then, I’ll git checkout develop, followed by theme download --env=develop to get the latest changes and see if there are any new/modified files I’ll need to commit before continuing
• If there are new/modified files, I’ll git commit -am "Theme download"
• Otherwise, I’ll just git merge <feature_name>, then theme deploy --env=develop to upload all my files I worked on to my dev environment
• Once all the files are upload, I’ll finally git push origin develop so all the files can be safe in the develop branch up in the cloud somewhere

And if all’s good in the hood and no edits need to be made in the dev environment, I’ll push all them shits to production:

• While chilling in the develop branch, with all the latest changes, I’ll git pull origin master
• Then, I’ll git push origin develop so that there be no conflicts between the two honies, ya dig?
• Afterwards, I’ll git checkout master and theme download --env=production to get the latest files from my Shopify’s production store
• Once again, if there be any new/modified files, I’ll git commit -am "Theme download" to have that on record
• Then, I’ll git merge develop so that all the files I worked on in <feature_name> gets passed around like a juicy blunt — from <feature_name>, to develop to master
• And as soon as that’s done, I’ll upload all the files to the production store with theme deploy --env=production
• Last, but not least, I’ll git push origin master so that it’s safe and sound up in the cloud with the other homies

Tools I use.

• Shout out to Visual Studio Code for always havin’ my back in the code editor game
• Big ups to SourceTree for helpin’ a ninja pull, commit and push nasty ass files
• Bitbucket, I see you dawg — thanks for hostin’ the party

And that’s about it.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to holler via email at no-reply@gmail.com 🤙