3. Connect to your store

Now that you have a new Slate project, you need to link it to your remote Shopify store by updating the .env file with your API credentials.

Example .env file

# The myshopify.com URL to your Shopify store
SLATE_STORE={store-name}.myshopify.com

# The API password generated from a Private App
SLATE_PASSWORD=ccf7fb19ed4dc6993ac6355c0c489c7c7

# The ID of the theme you wish to upload files to
SLATE_THEME_ID=32112656003

# A list of file patterns to ignore, with each list item separated by ':'
SLATE_IGNORE_FILES=config/settings_data.json

Setting SLATE_STORE

This refers to the URL of your Shopify store, e.g. store-name.myshopify.com.

Note: the https:// protocol is not included and neither is the trailing slash.

Setting SLATE_PASSWORD

Create a new private app by navigating to your store’s private apps page (https://{store-name}.myshopify.com/admin/apps/private), giving the private app a name and setting the Theme templates and theme assets to “Read and write”.

Hit the “Save” button, edit the new private app and click “Show” to view the Password field. This is your SLATE_PASSWORD.

Setting SLATE_THEME_ID

You can view a full list of all available theme IDs for your store by navigating to https://{store-name}.myshopify.com/admin/themes.xml.

Each theme entry will have an id tag. Set the SLATE_THEME_ID to the theme ID you want to deploy to.

Note: When you deploy your theme, Slate will overwrite the existing remote code associated with the SLATE_THEME_ID you defined with your local project’s code, which you may not want. To avoid this, navigate to https://{store-name}.myshopify.com/admin/themes and duplicate an existing theme ID to work from.

Setting SLATE_IGNORE_FILES

This is the only optional setting in the .env file and it enables you to ignore certain files from being deployed to your Shopify store. One example would be to ignore the settings_data.json file to avoid overwriting your theme’s section settings every time you deploy your theme.

The file paths are relative to the theme’s dist/ directory so ignoring the settings_data.json file would look like the following:

SLATE_IGNORE_FILES=config/settings_data.json

Creating an alternative .env file

Slate allows you to define multiple environment files. Users can specify the --env flag with slate-tools scripts to use with an .env.{env} file. For example:

yarn start --env=production

will look for a .env.production file.

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Next: Create a self signed SSL certificate