Dev Center and Your Local Environment

Dev Center is an online administrative portal for managing developer accounts, creating applications and theme records, and uploading, installing, and testing code before deploying it to a production site. It’s separate from your local development environment where you write code and manage source control repositories. Refer to Set Up Your System for more information about configuring Dev Center.

Before you start developing applications and themes, you’ll need to set up a local development environment. At a minimum, you need a text editor (e.g., Notepad++, Sublime Text) and source control system (e.g., Git, Subversion, Mercurial). After you set up your local development environment, use Developer Tools to build-out local directories with the necessary files to start developing applications and themes.

Since Kibo releases updates to the Core theme through Git, we highly recommend that you use Git as your source control system. Kibo also provides several command-line tools that leverage Git to make creating and updating themes and applications easier.

Elements of Dev Center

Dev Center includes the following components:

ItemDescription
DevAccountsYour client account that virtually partitions all Kibo data, configuration, operations, and users for your organization.
Developer AccountsUser accounts that can be invited to work on one or more DevAccount. Developer Accounts can be assigned different roles for different DevAccounts.
Production TenantsTenants used for publishing applications, themes, and catalog updates to a live website.
Sandbox TenantsTenants used exclusively for development purposes, such as testing applications and theme appearance.
ConsoleManage developer accounts, create applications and theme records, and test your work in sandboxes.
AdminManage your store catalog, orders, customers, marketing, and other site settings.

For More Information

For information about how to provision your own sandboxes and request production tenants, see Set Up Your System.

See the Email Customization documentation for the basic steps of setting up a theme and editing its Hypr files. If you need to learn about back-end development, check out our application documentation and SDKs. When you're finished developing applications and themes locally, you use Dev Center to upload and deploy these assets to test and production environments.