Development-store lifecycle tasks can now sit alongside the rest of a team’s terminal workflow. That makes naming, ownership and cleanup rules more important when environments are created repeatedly.
Shopify published Create and delete dev stores in Shopify CLI on 9 September 2026.
CLI 4.8 adds development-store management
Shopify CLI 4.8 introduces commands to create dev stores, list an organisation’s stores, inspect a store and delete dev stores. Deletion is restricted to store owners, organisation owners and organisation administrators.
The announced limit is 250 dev stores per Dev Dashboard organisation. Client transfer and collaborator stores do not count towards it. Shopify says organisations already above the limit have received an extension. These commands can accompany existing API workflows for preparing app or theme test environments.
Make temporary environments recognisable
Vivek Codes’ implementation advice:
- Give each test store a purpose, owner and expected lifetime in the team’s environment register. Keep reproducible seed data and setup steps with the project so a replacement environment can be created without copying an undocumented state.
- Before any cleanup, review an explicit list of store identities and confirm that each is disposable. Treat age as a signal for review rather than proof that a store is unused; another teammate may still rely on its app or theme configuration.
Read the official announcement for the release requirements. For help with this work, explore Shopify app development and testing or send Vivek Codes the implementation context.
Editorial brief based on Shopify’s announcement. The implementation advice is general guidance, not a test result for your store or app.
