Master Your Shopify Theme Development: A Step-by-Step Guide to Setting Up Your Dev Environment in 2025

Shopify makes it easy to customize your store without any coding experience. But sometimes, you might need to create a brand-new theme or app for your business. That’s where the real development tools come in.

Shopify offers powerful tools designed for developers. It uses common technologies, making it straightforward for both professionals and beginners to set up a development environment.

Before diving in, think about whether you truly need to set up this environment. Shopify is the leading eCommerce platform in North America, powering around 30% of online stores in the U.S. and Canada. Its popularity stems from its user-friendly nature, allowing for easy customization even for those without coding skills.

Shopify themes can be tailored in many ways, not just by dragging and dropping “no-code” blocks. If you know HTML, CSS, or the Liquid templating language, you can make deeper changes to the layout.

The Shopify App Store is filled with ready-made solutions. However, if your shop requires more specific changes, here’s how to get started with your own theme or app.

Setting Up Your Development Environment

To begin developing on Shopify, you’ll need the command line interface (CLI), specifically for themes. Here’s how you can set it up:

Step 1: Create a Shopify Partner Account

Your first step is to create a Shopify Partner account, which gives you free access to a development store for testing your custom theme.

Step 2: Install Shopify CLI

Next, you’ll need to install the Shopify CLI for themes. Here are the requirements:

• Node.js version 18.20+, 20.10, or higher
• A Node.js package manager
• Git version 2.28.0 or higher

You can use npm or Yarn to install the CLI. Open your terminal, make sure your package manager is set up, and run the following commands:

For npm:

npm install -g @shopify/cli@latest

For Yarn:

yarn global add @shopify/cli@latest

To check if everything installed correctly, you can run:

shopify version

Step 3: Create or Clone a Theme

Once the CLI is ready, you can either build a theme from scratch or clone a pre-existing one. The recommended option is to clone the Dawn theme as a foundation. Use this command:

shopify theme init your-theme-name

Step 4: Start the Local Server

Next, connect your theme to your Shopify development store. Navigate to your theme directory in the terminal using:

cd your-theme-name

Then use your development store’s URL in the following command:

shopify theme dev --store your-store-name.myshopify.com

This command will set up a local web server. Follow the prompts to log in to your Shopify account, and soon you’ll be able to view your changes live.

Step 5: Push Your Theme

As you make updates, you’ll want to push your changes back to your development environment or live Shopify store. Use this command to push the theme live:

shopify theme push --live

To update your local development setup, run:

shopify theme push --development

Your Next Steps

Setting up a Shopify theme development environment is fairly simple. But once you’re all set up, the real work begins as you start developing your custom theme.