Launch a storefront from your terminal

Launching a storefront usually means a week of glue work: scaffold a project, wire up store credentials, create a repo, click through a hosting dashboard, set environment variables, attach a domain, then figure out how you'll ever update the code without losing your customizations.

We compressed that into three words.

npm i -g zalify

zalify brand init my-brand        # 1. author the data
zalify site create my-brand       # 2. live site in ~4 minutes
zalify theme upgrade              # 3. stay current, keep your edits

The Zalify CLI models a storefront the way you actually think about it — three nouns, three objects:

brand is the data. A plain folder holding your product catalog, your brand voice guide, and an image manifest. zalify brand init scaffolds it with the full authoring contract built in — schema, naming conventions, even prompt-safety rules for AI-generated product photography — so a person or an AI agent can produce a complete, import-ready brand without reading anything else. zalify brand push sends the catalog to your Shopify store; zalify brand images generate renders the manifest into product photography on our infrastructure and brand images attach puts every shot on the right product.

site is the hosted deployment. zalify site create provisions everything server-side — a private GitHub repo, a production deployment linked to it, a domain, and your store's API token — then scaffolds the code locally and pushes. Your machine never holds an infrastructure credential: repo pushes use one-hour scoped tokens, and Shopify calls go through Zalify's authenticated proxy. About four minutes after typing the command, the site is serving.

theme is the code. Every scaffold is a plain Next.js project you own — no lock-in, no hidden runtime — with a checksum manifest of every file as shipped. Your customizations live in a theme/ folder (settings, templates, locales) that upgrades never touch. When we ship a new theme version, zalify theme upgrade overwrites the files you never edited, three-way-merges the ones you did, and leaves conflict markers where a human should look. It's the Shopify theme model, applied to a codebase you fully control.

Proof: five stores, five verticals

We used exactly this pipeline — same commands, no hand-editing — to build our demo fleet. Catalogs written to a brand voice guide, every product image AI-generated from the manifest, each theme configured in one settings file:

• Voltra — charging & power. Dark, technical, cyan on graphite.
• Aurelle — fine jewelry. Ivory, gold, editorial serif.
• Mirelle — fast fashion. Blush, rose, playful and quick.
• Pawfolk — pet supplies. Oat cream, terracotta, rounded corners everywhere.
• Crown & Co. — haircare, launching next. Its brand folder is already authored; going live is one zalify site create away, and this post will link it the day it ships.

Same engine, same components, same checkout — five completely different stores. The difference between them is a brand folder and one theme settings file. That's the point.

For the agents reading this

The complete plain-text CLI reference lives at www.zalify.com/cli.txt — command contracts, file formats, error codes, and the authoring rules. It's written so an AI agent can drive the whole lifecycle: author a brand folder, validate it, launch the site, push the catalog, generate the imagery. We know, because that's how these five stores were built.

npm i -g zalify and start with zalify brand init.