Graphql Admin API version 2025-10
Problem
We have been using the themeDuplicatemutation since it was first released. It has been working flawlessly until last week where it works most of the time but 1/10 times it may fail to duplicate the theme fully. We have not changed anything on our end in this flow.
We notice that the theme gets duplicated and we can see it in Shopify’s theme page in the admin (shop/<shop-name>/themes) but only some of the files copy over and that is it.
If we try to preview the theme we get this
Theme cannot be previewed because it's missing one of these required files: layout/theme.liquid, config/settings_schema.json
If we query the theme via the Admin API it shows that is is no longer processing and that processing didn’t fail.
Running the duplication again often succeeds. Why so unreliable? What changed?
The duplication clearly failed as it doesn’t have required files, so it should be marked as processingFailed: true so that we can handle it on our end. Or even better maybe Shopify could add internal validation to ensure all files from the source exist in the destination.
Hi @CliveShogun! There is a known behavior where the duplication process silently drops files that fail internal validation during the copy, typically files containing references to metafields, sections, or resources that don’t pass validation at copy time.
The fact retrying often works in your case however warrants further investigation - could you share the x-request-id header values from a couple of the themeDuplicate calls that resulted in incomplete themes (both a successful and a failed one would be ideal for comparison)
With those I can pull the logs for those calls and see what’s going on - thanks!
Thanks for the prompt reply @Donal-Shopify. I will try to track it down and get back to you.
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@Donal-Shopify I haven’t seen this happen again since I initially posted this. Something might have been fixed up on the backend at Shopify. If I come across a failure again I will reply here with the request id. Thanks!
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@Donal-Shopify We had this failure happen today. Here is the request-id d1c72572-aa17-480b-8a26-25c4077562cf-1771860833
Thanks for coming back with that @CliveShogun!
The mutation itself completed successfully and the background job that handles the file copy also logged as successful.
Since the job is logging success but you’re still seeing incomplete themes, I’m raising this with the relevant team so they can investigate what’s happening between the job completing and the theme being fully available. I’ll follow up here once I hear back from them - cheers!
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