Horizon

Getting started | Staying up to date with Horizon changes | Developer tools | Contributing | Code of conduct | Theme Store submission | License

Horizon is the flagship of a new generation of first party Shopify themes. It incorporates the latest Liquid Storefronts features, including theme blocks.

• Web-native in its purest form: Themes run on the evergreen web. We leverage the latest web browsers to their fullest, while maintaining support for the older ones through progressive enhancement—not polyfills.
• Lean, fast, and reliable: Functionality and design defaults to “no” until it meets this requirement. Code ships on quality. Themes must be built with purpose. They shouldn’t support each and every feature in Shopify.
• Server-rendered: HTML must be rendered by Shopify servers using Liquid. Business logic and platform primitives such as translations and money formatting don’t belong on the client. Async and on-demand rendering of parts of the page is OK, but we do it sparingly as a progressive enhancement.
• Functional, not pixel-perfect: The Web doesn’t require each page to be rendered pixel-perfect by each browser engine. Using semantic markup, progressive enhancement, and clever design, we ensure that themes remain functional regardless of the browser.

Getting started

We recommend using the Skeleton Theme as a starting point for theme development. Learn more on Shopify.dev.

If you're building a theme for the Shopify Theme Store, then you can use Horizon as a starting point. However, the theme that you submit needs to be substantively different from Horizon so that it provides added value for merchants. Learn about the theme developer tools.

Please note that the main branch may include code for features not yet released. The "stable" version of Horizon is available in the theme store.

Staying up to date with Horizon changes

Say you're building a new theme off Horizon but you still want to be able to pull in the latest changes, you can add a remote upstream pointing to this Horizon repository.

1. Navigate to your local theme folder.
2. Verify the list of remotes and validate that you have both an origin and upstream:

git remote -v

3. If you don't see an upstream, you can add one that points to Shopify's Horizon repository:

git remote add upstream https://github.com/Shopify/horizon.git

4. Pull in the latest Horizon changes into your repository:

git fetch upstream
git pull upstream main

Developer tools

There are a number of really useful tools that the Shopify Themes team uses during development. Horizon is already set up to work with these tools.

Shopify CLI

Shopify CLI helps you build Shopify themes faster and is used to automate and enhance your local development workflow. It comes bundled with a suite of commands for developing Shopify themes—everything from working with themes on a Shopify store (e.g. creating, publishing, deleting themes) or launching a development server for local theme development.

You can follow this quick start guide for theme developers to get started.

Theme Check

We recommend using Theme Check as a way to validate and lint your Shopify themes.

We've added Theme Check to Horizon's list of VS Code extensions so if you're using Visual Studio Code as your code editor of choice, you'll be prompted to install the Theme Check VS Code extension upon opening VS Code after you've forked and cloned Horizon.

You can also run it from a terminal with the following Shopify CLI command:

shopify theme check

You can follow the theme check documentation for more details.

Continuous Integration

Horizon uses GitHub Actions to maintain the quality of the theme. This is a starting point and what we suggest to use in order to ensure you're building better themes. Feel free to build off of it!

Shopify/theme-check-action

Horizon runs Theme Check on every commit via Shopify/theme-check-action.

Contributing

We are not accepting contributions to Horizon at this time.

Theme Store submission

The Shopify Theme Store is the place where Shopify merchants find the themes that they'll use to showcase and support their business. As a theme partner, you can create themes for the Shopify Theme Store and reach an international audience of an ever-growing number of entrepreneurs.

Ensure that you follow the list of theme store requirements if you're interested in becoming a Shopify Theme Partner and building themes for the Shopify platform.

License

Copyright (c) 2025-present Shopify Inc. See LICENSE for further details.