Run a theme update smoke test before publishing

Failure modes in this flow

A theme smoke test only needs to answer one question: can a shopper still get from the product grid to a payable checkout. Everything else is detail that can wait for the full suite.

• Know what was live - Dawn is marked Live before anything changes.
• Confirm the publish took - the admin reports that Refresh is now the live theme.
• Confirm the storefront agrees - the shopper-facing page reports the Refresh theme and still renders the product grid.
• Confirm checkout is reachable - add to cart, view cart, checkout, and a Payment section with a Pay button.

Checking that the storefront reports the new theme, and not only that the admin says so, is what separates a smoke test from a screenshot. Admin state and rendered output disagreeing is one of the more common theme publishing bugs.

Writing the objective

The test starts in admin and ends on the storefront, crossing between them mid-run. One warm browser carries the session across that boundary, so the storefront sees the state the admin just changed.

---
mode: testing
url: https://my-testing-repo-main.vercel.app/shopify-clone-app/admin?reset=true
max_steps: 45
tags: [shopify, theme, smoke]
---

# Shoplify 2.5: Theme update smoke

Catalog objective: after publishing a theme, walk the homepage through to checkout.
Key assertion: no broken layout and checkout is reachable.

## Confirm the live theme
Click "Themes" and verify the themes list shows "Dawn" marked "Live".

## Publish a different theme
Click "Publish" on "Refresh", then click "Publish theme" in the confirmation dialog, and verify a notice appears reading "Refresh is now the live theme."

## Confirm the storefront picked up the theme
Click "View storefront" and verify the storefront shows "Storefront is running the Refresh theme" and the product grid lists "Heavyweight Cotton Tee".

## Walk through to checkout on the new theme
Click "Add to cart" on "Heavyweight Cotton Tee", click "View cart", click "Checkout", and verify the checkout page renders with a "Payment" section and a "Pay" button.

The last step chains three navigations and asserts on the destination, which is the right trade for a smoke test. It is checking reachability, not the behaviour of each page in between. Run it with:

kane-cli testmd run tests/shopify/theme-update-smoke_test.md

Running it locally

Four passes in 187 seconds. The publish step is the slowest at 64.4 seconds because it goes through a confirmation dialog before the notice renders.

---
test: ../theme-update-smoke_test.md
status: passed
started: 2026-09-15T09:34:06.257Z
duration_s: 187
session_id: c76fff7d-0bd4-4ced-8bcb-eec76cb39ed7
---

# Shoplify 2.5: Theme update smoke - Result

## Confirm the live theme ✓ passed (30.4s)
md5: c30a8daf82a957fadea7eda802c1d543
Click "Themes" and verify the themes list shows "Dawn" marked "Live".

## Publish a different theme ✓ passed (64.4s)
md5: 363c89c4f271de015ef8ffa2c781ec0a
Click "Publish" on "Refresh", then click "Publish theme" in the confirmation dialog, and verify a notice appears reading "Refresh is now the live theme."

## Confirm the storefront picked up the theme ✓ passed (36.9s)
md5: 866a9cc9a70a713fb0ea5f2ab70231bd
Click "View storefront" and verify the storefront shows "Storefront is running the Refresh theme" and the product grid lists "Heavyweight Cotton Tee".

## Walk through to checkout on the new theme ✓ passed (52.9s)
md5: f68754786245759951c7e8b95f6f283c
Click "Add to cart" on "Heavyweight Cotton Tee", click "View cart", click "Checkout", and verify the checkout page renders with a "Payment" section and a "Pay" button.

Putting it in CI

You get a gate that runs in about three minutes and can sit between a theme publish and the merchant finding out from a customer. It is short enough that nobody argues about the cost of running it.

The same shape works as a deployment gate for any front end release. Agent-native CI/CD covers where these checks sit in a pipeline, and the run speed work in Kane CLI is worth reading if you plan to run smoke flows on every publish.