Shopify theme serve throwing error - "A shop may only have 100 development themes"

Technical Q&A

Topic summary

Shopify CLI (command-line interface) “theme serve” fails with the error “A shop may only have 100 development themes” on a specific store, despite the Admin showing only the live theme and one GitHub-linked theme. Listing via CLI showed more themes than the dashboard; standard fixes (logout/login, reconnect GitHub, update CLI, theme pull) didn’t help.

Cause/update: A bug leaves orphaned development themes that aren’t visible in Admin or via normal CLI listing. The lighthouse-ci-action (GitHub Action) is suspected to create these hidden themes.

Workaround that restored service:

  • Use Theme Kit to list themes and capture IDs: theme get --list -p=… -s=…
  • Delete by ID with Shopify CLI (supports bulk and --force): shopify theme delete [IDs] --force
  • After deleting the hidden development themes, “theme serve” works again.

Notes: You can pass a space-separated list of IDs for bulk deletion.

Status: The underlying issue remains open in the lighthouse-ci-action repository; a community script to automate removing all development themes via Shopify CLI is shared there. No official permanent fix announced.

Summarized with AI on December 30. AI used: gpt-5.
1

Yesterday the themes we had listed before on the Themes page in the admin panel disappeared, except for the live theme, and the theme I’ve been working on that was connected to Github.

Around the same time I started getting an error “A shop may only have 100 development themes” when running “shopify theme serve”. And just for this one store - it’s working for other stores I’m working on.

Is there any list of stores I can access to delete some? It seems like Shopify CLI isn’t properly deleting development stores when I run “shopify theme serve”

Other things I’ve tried:

  • shopify theme delete - which lists TWELVE themes, though only two are shown on our dashboard

  • shopify logout (and then logging back in)

  • disconnecting and reconnecting the Github theme in the Themes dashboard

  • updating Shopify CLI

  • running “shopify theme pull”

  • checking my theme for errors

Any help is much appreciated - I’m at a loss for how to solve this!

Screen Shot 2021-10-28 at 7.09.14 PM.png
Screen Shot 2021-10-28 at 7.09.14 PM.png1678×2590 647 KB

2

After weeks of having issues I found out this is because of a bug where development themes aren’t getting deleted, and there’s no way to see them in the admin dashboard, or see them listing out themes with Shopify CLI :/. I believe this bug is caused by lighthouse-ci-action (a Github action I had set up).

I set up a Themekit for the site, used Themekit to list out themes and get their IDs, and then used Shopify CLI to delete those themes. And I’m back up and running again!!

Here’s the step-by-step in case you’re facing the same issue:

  • Create a new theme using themekit using instructions here. Command to create a new theme once you have a password: theme new --password=[your-password] --store=“[your-store.myshopify.com]” --name=[theme name]

  • List all development themes using this Themekit command: theme get --list -p=[password] -s=“my-store.myshopify.com” (screenshot of what I saw below)

  • Delete each theme using Shopify CLI on the command line: shopify theme delete 128842694873 (see screenshot below)

  • Tip: You can delete multiple themes using Shopify CLI by providing a space-separated list. Eventually I used atom to quick select all the IDs and create one long list of ~80 development themes to delete (just be careful you only select the IDs for development themes).

    shopify theme delete 128842596569 128846004441 128845676761 12884305532

  • Tip #2: add --force to the end so that it doesn’t ask you to confirm for each theme you’re deleting. shopify theme delete 128842596569 128846004441 128845676761 12884305532 --force

Screen Shot 2021-11-15 at 6.13.01 PM.png
Screen Shot 2021-11-15 at 6.13.01 PM.png1292×230 25.4 KB

Screen Shot 2021-11-15 at 6.04.50 PM.png
Screen Shot 2021-11-15 at 6.04.50 PM.png1296×2580 680 KB

2 Likes
3

For anyone finding this in the future, here’s the (still currently) open issue in github: https://github.com/Shopify/lighthouse-ci-action/issues/30

While it would be best to simply not have the issue occur at all, I did post a solution in there to automate removing all development themes from the store using Shopify CLI. Hope that helps!