Feature request: add non-interactive reconciliation strategy flag for shopify theme dev

Dev Platform
1

Problem

When running shopify theme dev in a non-interactive environment (for example together with parallel dev tasks using concurrently, npm-run-all, turbo, bun, etc.), Shopify CLI fails with:

Failed to perform the initial theme synchronization.
Failed to prompt:

Reconciliation Strategy

This usually happens when running a command non-interactively

This happens because the CLI asks interactively whether to keep local or remote changes during the initial synchronization.

Why this is problematic

Modern frontend/theme development workflows often run multiple parallel processes:

  • Vite/Webpack dev server

  • Shopify theme dev server

  • Tailwind watcher

  • TypeScript watcher

  • synchronization scripts

For example:

{
  "scripts": {
    "dev": "concurrently \"vite\" \"shopify theme dev\""
  }
}

In such cases Shopify CLI becomes unusable because it requires an interactive prompt.

Requested solution

Please add a flag for reconciliation strategy, for example:

shopify theme dev --reconcile=local

or

shopify theme dev --keep-local

Possible values could be:

  • local

  • remote

  • ask (default current behavior)

Benefits

  • Enables proper CI/dev automation

  • Works with parallel task runners

  • Makes Shopify CLI friendlier for modern frontend workflows

  • Eliminates the need for hacks like ignoring settings_data.json

  • Improves DX significantly

Thank you!

2

shopify theme dev breaks in non-interactive environments because of the reconciliation prompt during initial sync.

Would be great to have something like:

shopify theme dev --reconcile=local

or support in shopify.theme.toml

This would help a lot with concurrently, turbo, bun, CI, and modern multi-process dev workflows.

3

This feature would be super helpful, my workflows always use Git so I always sync from local which makes this step not needed. Big thumbs up for this feature!