By the end of this the Atlas Page Builder app embed will be active on your theme, and you will be able to publish pages. This takes under a minute. You need to be able to edit the theme, which means the Manage themes permission in Shopify if you are working on someone else's store.
Every page Atlas publishes depends on this embed. Without it, publishing is blocked and any page already in your theme will not render properly.
In this article:
The quickest way, from Atlas
When the embed is off for the theme you are publishing into, Atlas turns it on for you in one click.
Open the Atlas editor, select
Publish pages, and choose the theme underPublishing to:.If the embed is off for that theme,
Publishis greyed out and anAtlas page builderrow appears under the theme picker, withTurn on to publish. This adds Atlas to your theme's app embeds.Turn on the switch. It reads
Turning on…for a moment.Atlas confirms with
App embed enabled. The row disappears andPublishunlocks.
The switch changes the theme for you, so there is no theme editor to open and nothing to save. If it shows We couldn't turn it on. Try again., work through If the switch does not work below.
From the dashboard, the theme extensions card has a Store builder switch, which is this embed on your published theme. When the embed is off, the Store builder switch shows Off. Select the switch and Atlas turns the embed on directly in your published theme, without opening the theme editor, then confirms with your published theme's name, for example Store builder is live on Dawn. Shopify can take a few seconds to report the change, and the card re-checks by itself.
⚠️ Whenever you go through the theme editor, Save is what applies the change. Opening the theme editor turns the toggle on, but nothing happens until you save. If Atlas still reports the embed as off, this is almost always why. Shopify's editor shows its own "activated" message as soon as the toggle flips, before anything is saved, so do not take that message as confirmation.
Doing it manually in the theme editor
If the switch in Atlas cannot turn the embed on, do it directly. This also works for a theme you are not publishing to yet.
In your Shopify admin, go to Online Store, then Themes.
Find the theme you want and select Customize.
In the theme editor, open Theme settings using the gear icon at the top of the left panel.
Select App embeds.
Find
Atlas Page Builderand turn the toggle on.Select Save.
Confirming it worked
In the publish panel, the Atlas page builder row is gone and Publish is no longer greyed out.
On your Atlas dashboard, the Store builder switch on the theme extensions card should be on.
If the Store builder switch still shows Off, check that you saved in the theme editor, and check you enabled the embed on the right theme. The theme extensions card reports on your published theme only.
Doing this for more than one theme
The embed is enabled per theme, not per store. That matters in three common situations:
Situation | What to do |
You publish Atlas pages into a theme that is not live | Enable the embed on that theme too |
You duplicate a theme to work on a copy | The duplicate usually keeps the setting, but confirm before publishing it |
You install or switch to a new theme | Enable the embed on the new theme before making it live |
⚠️ Switching to a theme without the embed will break every Atlas page on your storefront at once. Enable the embed on the new theme first, while it is still unpublished, then publish the theme.
If the switch does not work
Work through these in order:
Try the switch again. If you see
We couldn't turn it on. Try again., turn it on once more. If it fails a second time, selectOpen theme editorunder the message, thenSavein the theme editor that opens.Use the manual route above. It always works and takes about thirty seconds.
Check your permissions. Editing app embeds needs theme editing permission on the store.
Confirm you are on the right theme. The theme editor opens on one specific theme, and it may not be the one you meant.
Let Atlas check again. If you saved in the theme editor but Atlas has not noticed, go back to Atlas: it re-checks when you return. Closing the publish panel and opening it again also runs a fresh check. If that does not clear it, reload the Atlas page.
If the embed is on and saved but Atlas still reports it as inactive, contact support from the chat bubble in Atlas, or at support@helloatlas.io, with your store URL and the name of the theme.