Stop adding comment when rendering snippets

Extensions
1

Hello,

This is a very annoying stuff that is probably extremely easy to fix on Shopify end. When rendering a snippet in app extensions, the rendered content will be wrapped by a HTML comment

This only happens in app extensions, and provide a very inconsistent experience with how it works in themes. One big issue with this is that we often render snippets, and then render other contents conditionally. One pattern that I use often in themes is this:

{% capture something %}{% render 'something' %}{% endcapture %}

{% if something != blank %}
  // Do something
{% endif %}

But this never works in app theme xtensins, because for some reasons Shopify renders a comment, even when the output is empty.

To work around that, we therefore have to pollute our code with those kind of code:

{% capture something %}{% render 'something' %}{% endcapture %}
{% assign something = something | remove: <!-- BEGIN app snippet: SNIPPET-NAME --><!-- END app snippet --> %}

I’m all for having a consistent experience between theme and apps, and this is probably super easy to fix on Shopify end.

Thanks.

3 Likes
2

Adding my vote to this. I agree the comment should be optional and makes it so you can’t use snippets for capturing things like JSON or JavaScript partials.

Also, it would be nice if theme app snippets could render other theme app snippets to avoid dumping everything into the blocks.

3

Totally agree with both of you, this has been a long-standing inconsistency between themes and theme app extensions that really complicates conditional rendering. Those auto-injected <!-- BEGIN/END app snippet --> comments shouldn’t be part of the output, especially when capturing JSON, inline JS, or doing {% capture %} logic.

For 2025, I think the cleanest direction would be for Shopify to make this comment injection optional (through a flag or dev setting) so snippet rendering behaves consistently across environments.

Developers could still enable comments for debugging but disable them in production for clean markup. There’s already relevant discussion on snippet rendering behavior in the docs ( Theme architecture ) and how extensions render Liquid ( About theme app extensions )

It’d be great to see this streamlined, even small inconsistencies like this make scalable theming harder. A real-time sync platform like Stacksync benefits from the same principle: consistent behavior across all environments avoids fragile workarounds.