How To Install Shopify's AI Toolkit On Your Machine (Step By Step)

Shopify just dropped an AI Toolkit that connects Claude Code directly to your live Shopify store — real-time API schemas, code validation, theme editing, the whole thing. A few people asked how to actually get it running, so here's the full command-by-command walkthrough.

Mac

Open Terminal and run the following, one by one:

# Install Node.js via Homebrew (skip if you already have Node 18+)
brew install node

# Verify Node version
node -v

# Install Claude Code
curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash

# Launch Claude Code
claude

# Inside Claude Code, run these two commands:
/plugin marketplace add Shopify/shopify-ai-toolkit
/plugin install shopify-plugin@shopify-ai-toolkit

Restart Claude Code. Start a new conversation and ask something like "list my active products." It'll open a browser window — paste your store URL in the format your-store.myshopify.com, approve the OAuth scopes, and you're in. You only do this once, it persists across sessions.

Windows

This one has a couple of extra steps that'll save you a headache. Claude Code on Windows requires Git Bash to run, so before anything else:

Step 1 — Install Git for Windows. Head to git-scm.com/downloads/win and download the installer. When you go through the setup wizard, make sure you pick the option that adds Git to PATH — this is important, don't skip past it. Without this, Claude Code won't be able to launch.

Step 2 — Install Node.js and Claude Code. Open PowerShell and run:

# Install Node.js via winget (skip if you already have Node 18+)
winget install OpenJS.NodeJS.LTS

# Close and reopen PowerShell, then verify
node -v

# Install Claude Code
irm https://claude.ai/install.ps1 | iex

Step 3 — Close and reopen PowerShell. This is the part that trips people up. The installer updates your PATH but the current terminal session doesn't pick it up. You need to fully close PowerShell and open a fresh window before the claude command will work.

# In your fresh PowerShell window:
claude

If you're still getting a "command not found" error after reopening PowerShell, the npm global bin directory isn't in your system PATH yet. Here's how to fix it:

Press Win + R, type sysdm.cpl, hit Enter
Go to the Advanced tab
Click Environment Variables
Under User variables (top section), find Path and double-click it
Click New and add: %APPDATA%\npm
Click OK on all dialogs
Close and reopen PowerShell
Run claude

Step 4 — Install the Shopify plugin. Once claude launches, run these two commands inside Claude Code in order:

/plugin marketplace add Shopify/shopify-ai-toolkit

/plugin install shopify-plugin@shopify-ai-toolkit

/reload-plugins

Restart Claude Code (/exit then claude), start a new chat, ask it something that needs store access, authenticate with your your-store.myshopify.com URL, and you're done.

If you prefer to install Node manually instead of using winget, just grab the LTS installer from nodejs.org and run it. Same result.

TL;DR for Windows

Install Git for Windows (with "Add to PATH" checked)
Install Node.js 18+
Install Claude Code via PowerShell
Close and reopen PowerShell
Run claude (if it fails, add %APPDATA%\npm to your PATH via sysdm.cpl)
Install the Shopify plugin inside Claude Code

What to try once you're set up

Once you're authenticated, here are a few things worth poking at:

"Show me my active products" — pulls live data from your store, not cached, not from training data.

"Is this Liquid code valid?" — paste a snippet and it checks against the actual current Shopify schema. This one alone has saved us a lot of back-and-forth.

"Get me all orders from the last 7 days with fulfillment status" — it writes the GraphQL query using correct, current field names and runs it against your store.

"Change the heading in my hero section to X" — it finds the theme, locates the template, patches the JSON, and pushes the change. Try this one on a dev store first until you're comfortable with how it works.

One thing we liked: it doesn't grab every permission upfront. When you ask it to read analytics, it requests that scope. When you later ask it to edit a theme, it asks for theme write separately. Much better than the usual "give me access to everything" approach.

The whole thing is free, open-source, and auto-updates. We'd recommend testing on a dev store before pointing it at anything live — just good practice. If you need a hand getting set up or want to see how this fits into your store's workflow, drop us a line.