Activate a custom theme

The Magento design configuration is managed in the Admin. Let’s set our custom theme to the new active theme.

First, from the Admin, we will visit Content > Design > Configuration.

To set our entire default site to the theme, select the first record in this list, which is Default Global. This will set the theme to use for the frontend store view, which is what we want. If you wanted to set the theme just for a specific website or store view, that’s when you would choose one of the other options.

Now click Flush Magento Cache and thta will purge caches and make theme available

Refreshing frontend will show our new Juno theme. This doesn’t look too bad at the moment because it extends from blank theme. And since no changes, this is exactly how the blank theme looks. Now that we have a custom theme set up though, we can now customize & extend it.

If you view the browser source of the page, you’ll see references to “juno” in the head of the HTML, which confirms that it is the currently active theme.

Note that if you have a typo in the name of your theme, you’ll need to manually remove the theme from the database. If this happens, connect to the MySQL database and look at the theme table. In here, you’ll see there is a reference to our new Juno theme. So if you do need to change the name name at any time or had a typo, first delete this row out of the database, then clear the Magento caches for the updates to take effect.