Add live theme to github without losing apps settings

[mmlacabra]

Hi everyone,

Very new to shopify and taken over a few stores in my new job.

I have a live theme for our main website store in which we use many different apps for custom fields, langify, etc etc so I believe i noticed that these settings are lost if i publish a new theme, even tho it might be a 1:1 clone of the live theme.

We have always used the shopify admin or the cli with "dev" to make changes. What I would like to do is continuing to do the same, but have this live theme in a github repo.

How do I go about achieving this without losing the settings? I thought about these 2 options:

1) Download a copy of the theme, put it on github, publish that theme as the live theme. (this however loses all the settings and I am afraid risking doing this in production so i will not. I tested it in dev and does not seem to preserve the settings and I am afraid I won't even know exactly all the settings that I might lose, given that it's only the obvious ones that i noticed, like language and some styling of the language / currency)

2) Pull locally via cli the theme and make that into the github repo. But then i think i have the same problem as the above. 

I'd love any help to tell me how i can go about solving this issue 😕

[mmlacabra]

I am not sure I understand. Let's just use the example of langify which adds a language dropdown and currency dropdown. If I have a live theme which is not in github, if I take an exact copy of it, make it into a repo in github and then publish this github one as live theme on my store (which is an exact 1:1 copy of the currently live one) then it loses the dropdown and styles. 

So are you saying that there is an option for the themes that would allow me to use some sort of "system settings" to inherit the langify settings, data, custom css etc from the theme that was previously in use?

[mmlacabra]

Anyone?