Flux Overview

What is Flux?

Flux is Alloy's environment management solution for Shopify. It provides the change management layer that Shopify doesn't ship out of the box: capture state, diff changes between environments, deploy with confidence, and roll back in seconds.

Every change in a Shopify store happens live, in production, with no staging and no way back. Flux changes that by introducing a structured release workflow across multiple environments.

Core concepts

Environments

An environment in Flux maps to a Shopify store. Each store is classified by its role — source, QA, release candidate, or production. Your source environment is where content is authored. Target environments receive deployments through the release workflow.

Store groups

A store group is the root organisational unit. It contains your source store, your target stores, and the backing repository. All operations happen within a store group.

Syncs

A sync reads data from a Shopify store and captures it as an immutable snapshot. There are three sync types:

• Objects sync — reads store data (products, collections, pages, menus, etc.)
• Theme sync — reads theme files
• File sync — reads the file/asset library

Syncs track detailed statistics: objects created, updated, skipped, errored, and total duration. Incremental syncs only process objects that have changed since the last sync.

Diffs

A diff compares two snapshots and produces a detailed changeset showing exactly what was added, modified, or deleted — down to the field level. Diffs power the release review experience, letting your team see precisely what will change before deploying.

Releases

A release is the unit of deployment in Flux. It packages a set of changes, runs them through a review and approval workflow, and deploys them atomically to target environments.

Release types:

• Objects — deploys store data changes
• Theme — deploys theme changes
• Hybrid — deploys both store data and theme changes

See the releases documentation for the full workflow.

Supported object types

Flux supports the full lifecycle for all major Shopify object types:

• Products (including variants, media, selling plans, and metafields)
• Collections (manual and smart)
• Pages
• Blogs and articles
• Menus (navigation)
• Discounts
• Metaobject definitions and entries
• Metafield definitions
• Files

Next steps

• Learn the release workflow end to end
• Explore the API reference for programmatic access