Shopify Github Action for versioning

May 20, 2022

Shopify recently updated their admin panel again and started to display the value of theme_version from config/settings_schema.json onto the theme listing page. Example (yellow highlight):

With our setup, all our client themes are connected to Github and every release gets tagged a version in SYMVER format.

Depending on a developer or release manager to manually update config/settings_schema.json before releasing is not ideal; even with a process guide or release checklist, there is a chance it can be missed. We wanted an automated solution to update the theme_version value upon a tag being pushed to the master branch.

We have come up with the following solution (.github/workflows/schema_version.yml):

name: Schema version

on:
  create:
    tags: [ v* ]

jobs:
  replacement:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    if: startsWith(github.ref, 'refs/tags/v')
    steps:
      - name: Checkout repo
        uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: Update settings_schema.json
        run: |
          sed -i 's/"theme_version": ".*"/"theme_version": "'${GITHUB_REF_NAME:1}'"/g' config/settings_schema.json

      - name: Commit changes
        uses: EndBug/add-and-commit@v9
        with:
          push: origin HEAD:master
          default_author: github_actions
          message: "Updated settings_schema.json to version '${{ github.ref_name }}'"
          add: config/settings_schema.json

Now, anytime a version tag gets pushed to the master branch, the action will do the following:

1. Confirm the action to only run upon tagging; lines 3-5
2. Confirm the steps will only run if tagging happened; line 10
3. Checkout the repository; lines 12-13
4. Utilize sed to inline-replace the theme_version value to ${GITHUB_REF_NAME} (removes the v); line 17
5. Commit the changes to the schema with a commit message containing the version; lines 19-25

Hopefully this is a helpful starting point for any other developers looking to do the same process.