Easel: Vite for Shopify Liquid themes

I have spent years building Shopify themes, and the development setup has often felt harder than it should. You either work around a basic asset pipeline or spend time maintaining a custom Vite integration before you can build the storefront itself.

I built Easel to make modern Shopify theme development easier. It is a Vite plugin and theme generator designed specifically for Shopify Liquid themes: fast local development, modern frontend tooling, and safe builds into Shopify's shared theme directories.

Start clean or bring your theme

For a new theme, one command creates a focused starting point with your choice of TypeScript or JavaScript, Alpine, React, Vue, Tailwind CSS, or plain CSS:

npm create easel-theme@latest my-theme

If you already have a theme, add vite-plugin-shopify-easel to the project and keep the structure you know.

What Easel handles

Easel gives theme projects Vite-native source code, hot module replacement, named script and style bundles, and generated Liquid for loading those assets. It only manages the output it owns, so builds do not sweep away unrelated files in assets or snippets.

Shopify CLI still handles authentication, previews, synchronisation, deployment, and packaging. Easel focuses on the frontend build layer and works alongside it rather than trying to replace it.

Try Easel

If you are starting a Shopify theme or tired of maintaining the same custom build setup from project to project, start with Easel. The documentation covers the complete setup, and the project is open source on GitHub.

Easel is independently developed and has no Shopify sponsorship or endorsement.