Shopify Theme Kit: What is Theme Kit? How it work?

The popularity of Shopify is increasing by miles and boundaries in the global e-commerce industry. When it comes to building Best Online Stores, It remains the talk of the town among Shopify experts. As developers, we all acknowledge the importance of Shopify based on the results it delivers. It is, by far, one of the greatest e-commerce platforms for making it easy for people to sell online; you can customize it to your requirements.

Shopify provides all those features which can make a blastful results for any startup or middle-level store. In our 8+ years of experience, we haven’t seen Downtime in Shopify due to any maintenance issue or else. And what’s more appreciating is that whenever your Development is working on your Shopify site/store update, it doesn’t affect the performance of your store.

Shopify has an easy to earn and interactive admin GUI, which is easily operatable by non-technical people, too. This ultimately means anyone with great technical knowledge can work effortlessly with Shopify. In the case where you need an expert to meet your expectations, Remember; hiring a Shopify Developer is not costly at all.

Shopify enables you to access and alter the theme source code. After that, you must re-upload the theme, or you may copy the changed files and store them in your editor before you begin coding. However, because developers find this procedure tiring and wasteful, Shopify offers two alternate methods.

• 1st solution: it’s easy to code from admin areas as it provides necessary suggestions. And once you save the code it’ll show the error generating files, so your live store cannot get affected by any errors.
• 2nd solution: It is simply the Theme Kit option. and as a Shopify Developer or Shopify Development Services Provider, we select ThemeKit. Nowadays most developers are well aware of ThemeKit.

So in this post, we’ll share the Features of Shopify ThemeKit and walk you through the Process of Shopify ThemeKit, Which can help you understand the topic deeply.

 

 

What Is Shopify Theme Kit?

Shopify ThemeKit is basically designed for Shopify themes. ThemeKit is a Cross-Platform Command-line tool, which is most significant for developing Shopify Themes.

If you trust it or not, ThemeKit has simplified the development process to the great extent, as it allows users to download the whole theme on the system to use that theme on their preferred editor. And whenever the user saves that file, it automatically gets uploaded to your desired theme. So now you can sense how effectively it works with Command-Line.

Consequently, as a Shopify expert, if you haven't used ThemeKit before and wish to understand how this all works, the steps below can be really beneficial.

 

Getting started with Theme Kit

To get started with ThemeKit the following will be required:

• Access to Shopify Store
• Basic Knowledge of Command Line

 

Step:1 Installation of ThemeKit

ThemeKit can be easily installed from Command-Line on the following operational systems:

1. Linux:

The following Installation Script will download and install the latest version of ThemeKit automatically on your device.

$ curl -s https://shopify.dev/themekit.py | sudo python

2. Windows:

For Windows, you can install ThemeKit with Chocolatey by attaching the following command.

$ choco install themekit

3. macOS:

You can easily install ThemeKit with Homebrew by adapting the following commands:

$ brew tap shopify/shopify
$ brew install themekit

 

Step:2 Get a Theme kit password

Once you install ThemeKit on your operating system, you’ll have to get a password of ThemeKit to connect ThemeKit to your store to manage template files.

Any store member or a staff member(with permission) can create a password for ThemeKit using the Theme Kit Access app.

Here are the steps to it:

• Ask the store owner or staff member with relevant rights to generate a Theme Kit password to use the Theme Kit Access app.
• Go to your mailbox and open the invitation that contains your Theme Kit password.
• Click “Get Theme Kit password” in the invitation.
• Take note of the password. It will be required in the next step.

NOTE: You can only view that password once, also the link will get expired after 7 days.

 

Step:3 Connect to an existing theme

NOTE: If you don’t have to work on any existing theme, you can easily create a new theme.

When you’re connecting to an existing theme, you’ll require the Theme's ID. The “Theme Get Command”, which provides a list of themes and IDs that exist on the store, is the simplest way to get your theme's ID.

Here’s an example of Theme Get-Command, and your password for it is the same from Step:2 and your store is your store’s Shopify domain name:

$ theme get --list--password=[your-password]--store="[your-store.myshopify.com]"

Tip: Do not include URL protocol (HTTP or HTTPS) in store parameter.

Using Powershell:

While using PowerShell, you must insert quotation marks around the URL if it's followed by a single dash. This is especially critical if you're using the command's short. For example, the following is one example that will work and one that will not:

Correct Example:
1 theme get --list -p=[password] -s="my-store.myshopify.com"
Incorrect Example:
1 theme get --list -p=[password] -s=my-store.myshopify.com

 

Step:4 Set up your Config. File

A config.yml file establishes a local link to the theme of your Shopify store. You may leverage the previously obtained information (Theme Kit password and theme ID) to create a config.yml file in your theme and afterward download the theme directly.

1. Create a directory for your theme:
$ mkdir [your-theme-name]

2. Navigate to the new directory:
cd [your-theme-name]

3. For Downloading the specific theme, and creating the config.yml file that connects this theme with a local version in the directory you just created, insert the following command:
$ theme get --password=[your-password] --store="[your-store.myshopify.com]" --themeid=[your-theme-id]

 

Step:5 Create a new theme

Insert the following command, to create a new theme:
$ theme new --password=[your-password] --store="[your-store.myshopify.com]" --name=[theme name]

Inserting Theme New Command can make the following changes:

• Directly creates a simple theme template
• In your Shopify store, a new theme is created.
• Inserts the new files in your Shopify store.
• Creates or adjusts your config.yml file with your new theme's configuration.

 

Step:6 Push updates to your theme

Once you’ve established a connection to a Shopify theme, you can insert the following command in your theme directory:

$ theme watch

The theme watch command instructs ThemeKit to look after any changes which are made to your local files and automatically pushes changes into your theme in the connected Shopify Store. When you want to close the watch connection, type Ctrl+C

 

Conclusion:

We also use Theme Kit to create custom themes on Shopify, and we like it as it has massively developer-friendly commands. We would also say that we have a copy of the code in the local system.

Our Years of experience in coding and effective problem-solving have given us this level of expertise. Whenever it comes to Hiring Shopify Experts for your eCommerce site, their level of competence is a critical criterion to consider.

The Shopify Theme Kit is a simple and convenient method to bring your eStore to life by ensuring that your customers have a connection to your brand.

If there is any question/query is arise in your mind, you can reach us at [email protected] we would love to hear from you!