From Ruby to Node: Overhauling Shopify’s CLI for a Better Developer Experience (2023)

Before Shopify CLI, theme developers were using another CLI of ours, ThemeKit, which we had been maintaining since October 2014. It was written in Ruby and built on Ruby gems like cli-kit, cli-ui, and theme-check that we use in internal CLIs and services.When we started working on the first Shopify CLI to help App developers in December 2018, Ruby was a sensible choice considering the resources and knowledge that we had built around the language. Users would need to have a global Ruby installation to use the CLI, but we took care of that by providing installers for all the supported OSs (Windows, Linux, and macOS). In December 2020, we took the first step towards centralizing all the development in a single CLI by merging ThemeKit into the Shopify CLI.