How can I develop a new theme for a live store without disruptions?

Technical Q&A
1

I have to develop a new theme for a store that is already live. Wondering what is the best way to do that without affecting the production store.

  1. Create a new theme on the production site and preview the changes until the theme is developed. Then activate the theme

  2. Duplicate a current theme on the production site and preview the changes.

  3. Can I duplicate the current store as a development store, build a theme and then import the theme on the production site? (Like Wordpress, I prefer this way)

Please guide.

Thanks

2

Personally I opt for duplicating the live theme and just start working on the unpublished theme. You can also use something like shopify naked, it’s essentially a stripped shopify theme with the bare essentials. It’s old, and unsupported, but it can save you a lot of time from removing a lot of bulk to your themes if you already know what you need and dont need:

https://github.com/thisiscapra/shopify-naked

3

Thanks! Looks like they recommend using the dawn theme. Do you think it’s safe to use Shopify cli on a production site? I am thinking of following these steps. https://shopify.dev/themes/getting-started/create

4

Should be fine, if it’s anything like ThemeKit (which it seems like it is) you’ll be providing an ID for your theme which you would be pulling from your unpublished theme so there shouldn’t be any issues.