Hey! I’m curious about your workflows for developing Shopify themes in 2025.
I’ve already made a post some time ago specifically about using Vite. It gives me a great setup with hot reload, SCSS/TS support, and outputs everything into the assets folder - perfectly matching Shopify’s expectations.
But now I’m wondering - what other tools or setups are you all using?
Here’s my current situation:
On an older store I still have a Gulp.js-based workflow (yeah, it’s getting outdated).
On recent ones, I’m using vite-shopify and am happy with it so far. But maybe there is a better approach. Maybe simpler?
That said, I’d love to learn more about how other devs approach this.
Are you using different bundlers like Webpack, or something custom?
How do you manage SCSS and TypeScript compilation?
Looking for workflows that feel fast, modern, and clean - especially for handling assets in the /assets folder properly.
Yes! I don’t have any public repositories I can share with you but is great and I learned a lot about both Shopify and Vite via the project. I’ve taken a step back from it as I learn horizon but it’s looking like another foundational theme that isn’t as modular or flexible in the way I want it to be.
Currently, I actually do a lot of design work with Astro and PandaCSS + SolidJs. The DX in astro is so nice, so I build the components out to static HTML and PandaCSS recipes make it easy to generate layered component and token layers that I can drop into anything. It might sound more complicated than it is; but it keeps things platform agnostic and I find liquid and the Shopify CLI a little cumbersome in the creative process. You can use graphql api to pull store data to stay in Astro as long as possible hehe. I’m waiting on someone to do an integration or build step for transforming props into liquid schemas but it’s something I might have to do myself…
Seeing Shopify’s commitment to Web Components has been nice, I’d like to move more into that. Panda and Astro are all TS so that’s all sorted.
I too would really like to hear what other devs are doing.
Hi, @slurpyb. Thanks for sharing your flow. I appreciate the insight! I get what you mean about Liquid and the CLI feeling a bit clunky for creative work - that friction is real.
Hi, I’m planning to migrate some of our clients to the new Horizon theme. I’d like to maintain modularity in our styles and optimize their loading as much as possible. So far, I’ve been using Vite and working with SCSS/TS files, which were then compiled into classic CSS and JS.
In 2025/2026, does it still make sense to use SCSS, given that CSS is gradually taking over a lot of functionalities? My main concern is keeping the BEM methodology and the ability to nest classes.
I came across this thread, and as a newly launched Shopify agency, I’m looking to explore vite, tailwind and TS (Decorators), alot of Shopify code can be wrapped easily as a decorator, making it easier to develop new components. I’m working on this TS library
I still use Vite with SCSS, but now also with TypeScript for theme development. I work with Horizon now, and I load assets per section or block via the theme’s vite-tag snippet instead of one big global bundle, so only the sections on the page get their CSS and JS. That keeps things modular and avoids shipping unused code.
I keep my files namespaced so they don’t overwrite Horizon’s assets.
@lynthius Same here, I recently created a simple boilerplate, but mostly around using TypeScript decorators, I guess the question would be, how you handle editing a transpiled JS, but I believe there’s no other way than being tied to the Vite transpiler. Here is a boilerplate, I didn’t use SCSS, I went with tailwind, but I might look towards that so far tailwind seems quite nice for certain situations.
I’m looking to explore creating themes for my agency with easy reusable decorators.