Deploying Shopify Themes with Beanstalk: First Run Review

Managing the deployment process for Shopify themes has been pretty painful for quite some time. A post by Lucid Design’s Galen King (“What’s your Shopify theme deployment strategy?”) has been sitting in my bookmarks folder for a year without ever getting a great answer.

Like Galen, I’ve been using a combination of Git and the excellent shopify_theme gem, but it still feels a bit ad-hoc when you compare it to the smooth deployment strategies I’m used to for application deployment.

Beanstalk and Shopify

When I saw that Beanstalk had recently released a “Deploy to Shopify” option for repositories hosted with them, I was super keen to try it out.

I live-recorded my first run through, which you can watch below (it’s only 13 minutes long). I don’t think I make any huge mistakes apart from mixing a metaphor and somehow ending up with the phrase “off the top of the bat”.

If video’s not your thing, the TL;DR is that I’m really impressed with the process and I think I’ll be incorporating Beanstalk into my workflow.