The Shopify theme gem is a command line tool that lets you make live changes to themes on your Shopify store. If the command line is scary, check out the Desktop Theme Editor app.

It will watch your local folders for any changes in your theme (including adding and removing files) and will update your .myshopify.com store to the latest changes.

You do not need to make changes to your default theme. You can leverage the theme preview feature of Shopify that allows you to view what an unpublished theme looks like on your Shopify store. This means you don't need to sign up for extra accounts and keep your shop up to date. You will however have a blue bar that shows up that you can remove via the web inspector in Chrome or Safari.

This gem works with OS X or Windows with Ruby 1.9.

First time installing Ruby on windows? Try Rubyinstaller.

To install the shopify_theme gem use 'gem install' (you might have use 'sudo gem install')

gem install shopify_theme [optional_theme_id]

to update to the latest version

gem update shopify_theme

Generate the config file. Go get a valid api_key and password for your store head to https://[your store].myshopify.com/admin/apps/private and generate a private application. By default it adds the main theme, if you want to edit one of your other themes, add the theme_id.

theme configure api_key password store_url

Example of config.yml. Notice store has no http or https declaration. You can use :whitelist_files: to specify files for upload. The assets/, config/, layout/, snippets/, templates/ and locales/directories are included by default.

You can also use :ignore_files: to exclude files from getting uploaded, for example your config/settings.html or other configuration driven items

---
:api_key: 7a8da86d3dd730b67a357dedabaac5d6
:password: 552338ce0d3aba7fc501dcf99bc57a81
:store: little-plastics.myshopify.com
:theme_id:
:whitelist_files:
- directoryToUpload/
- importantFile.txt
:ignore_files:
- config/settings.html

Download all the theme files

theme download

Upload a theme file

theme upload assets/layout.liquid

Remove a theme file

theme remove assets/layout.liquid

Completely replace shop theme assets with the local assets

theme replace

Watch the theme directory and upload any files as they change

theme watch

Open the store in the default browser

theme open

Bootstrap a new theme with Timber

# use latest stable
theme bootstrap api_key password shop_name theme_name

# use latest build
theme bootstrap api_key password shop_name theme_name master

If you are experiencing SSL validation errors, it is most likely because your installation does not have any valid certificates. This can be taken care of by downloading a certificate file and setting a the SSL_CERT_FILE environment variable on your system. For more details check out the following gist.

See the following issue for more details

This can be done by setting the theme_id field in config.yml which was created when you ran theme configure. Your file should look like the following:

---
:api_key: 7a8da86d3dd730b67a357dedabaac5d6
:password: 552338ce0d3aba7fc501dcf99bc57a81
:store: little-plastics.myshopify.com
:theme_id: 0987654321

Currently the best way to find the id of the theme you want to edit is to go to the theme in your shops admin and grab it from the url.