Theme Modules Overwriting Modules on Live Site

[MrCapp]

I ran into an issue that I need some help troubleshooting.

I've been rolling the 50+ modules of our site into a theme.

My process has been to copy the modules and dependencies from our live server to my dev server. I then make edits in Hubspot and clean up some of the older modules to make them easier to use for our content editors. Then I download the modules to my local machine and add them to the theme.

Yesterday, I wanted to test out the theme on the live site server and make sure the modules were working properly, paths were resolving etc. I zipped a copy of the theme and added it to the site via the Themes Settings section of the site, did some initial testing and then went to delete the theme.

However, when I attempted to do that, I saw several warning messages that deleting the theme would affect nine live pages. About seven of the 50+ modules in the theme had warning messages, but these modules were used several times. Upon checking the live site, we discovered those modules were now broken - the content was unformatted in each of the modules and the nine pages and looked wonky.

I started to investigate to see if I could roll things back. I found that the modules that were "broken" were no longer in the Design Tools and were only showing up in the theme. I had to move each module back into the Design Tools and then roll each module to its last published version which got things working again.

So how do I prevent this from happening again?

This problem only happened the most recent modules I moved over - the other 40+ modules didn't appear to have any issues. I clearly did something different, but I'm not entirely sure what it was. I'm assuming that these modules still had the same ID number as the versions on the live site and that's what caused the overwriting. Can anyone confirm that?

Is there something specific I need to double check in the module JSON files before uploading the theme to ensure this goes smoothly next time?

Thanks for reading.

[Jaycee_Lewis]

Hi, @MrCapp 👋 Thanks for reaching out. Hey, @Anton @BarryGrennan, do you have any tips or feedback for @MrCapp on how to prevent this type of issue in the future?

Best,

Jaycee

[MrCapp]

Thanks for that - I can provide more details if anyone has questions.