Storybook for Angular tutorial

Storybook runs alongside your app in development mode. It helps you build UI components isolated from the business logic and context of your app. This edition of Learn Storybook is for Angular; other editions exist for React, React Native, Vue, Svelte and Ember.

Setup Angular Storybook

We’ll need to follow a few steps to get the build process set up in your environment. To start with, we want to use the @angular/cli to setup our build system, and enable Storybook and Jest testing in our created app. Let’s run the following commands:

# Create our application:
npx -p @angular/cli ng new taskbox --style css

cd taskbox

# Add Storybook:
npx -p @storybook/cli sb init

Setup Jest with Angular

We have two out of three modalities configured in our app, but we still need one, we need to setup Jest to enable testing.

Run the following command:

npm install -D jest @types/jest jest-preset-angular@7.1.1 @testing-library/angular @testing-library/jest-dom @babel/preset-env @babel/preset-typescript

Create src/jest-config folder and inside some files will be added.

Start by creating a file called globalMocks.ts with the following:

// src/jest-config/globalMocks.ts
const mock = () => {
  let storage = {};
  return {
    getItem: key => (key in storage ? storage[key] : null),
    setItem: (key, value) => (storage[key] = value || ''),
    removeItem: key => delete storage[key],
    clear: () => (storage = {}),
  };
};

Object.defineProperty(window, 'localStorage', { value: mock() });
Object.defineProperty(window, 'sessionStorage', { value: mock() });
Object.defineProperty(window, 'getComputedStyle', {
  value: () => ['-webkit-appearance'],
});

Followed with a new file called setup.ts with the following:

// src/jest-config/setup.ts
import 'jest-preset-angular';
import './globalMocks';

Object.defineProperty(global, 'Promise', { writable: false, value: global.Promise });

Then create a new file called styleMock.js with the following:

// src/jest-config/styleMock.js
module.exports = {};

Also fileMock.js with the following:

// src/jest-config/fileMock.js
module.exports = 'file-stub';

Now in the root of your project folder, create a file called babel.config.js with the following content:

// babel.config.js
module.exports = function(api) {
  process.env.NODE_ENV === 'development' ? api.cache(false) : api.cache(true);
  const presets = [
    [
      '@babel/preset-env',
      {
        targets: {
          node: 'current',
        },
      },
    ],
    '@babel/preset-typescript',
  ];
  const plugins = [];
  return {
    presets,
    plugins,
  };
};

Add a new field to package.json with the following:

{
  ....
   "jest": {
    "preset": "jest-preset-angular",
    "setupFilesAfterEnv": [
      "<rootDir>/src/jest-config/setup.ts"
    ],
    "transformIgnorePatterns":[
      "node_modules/(?!@storybook/*)"
    ],
    "testPathIgnorePatterns": [
      "<rootDir>/node_modules/",
      "<rootDir>/dist/",
      "<rootDir>/storybook-static/",
      "<rootDir>/src/test.ts"
    ],
    "coveragePathIgnorePatterns": [
      "/jest-config/",
      "/node_modules/"
    ],
    "snapshotSerializers": [
      "<rootDir>/node_modules/jest-preset-angular/AngularSnapshotSerializer.js",
      "<rootDir>/node_modules/jest-preset-angular/HTMLCommentSerializer.js"
    ],
    "globals": {
      "ts-jest": {
        "tsConfig": "<rootDir>/tsconfig.spec.json",
        "stringifyContentPathRegex": "\\.html$",
        "diagnostics": false,
        "isolatedModules": true,
        "astTransformers": [
          "<rootDir>/node_modules/jest-preset-angular/InlineHtmlStripStylesTransformer"
        ]
      }
    },
    "moduleNameMapper": {
      "\\.(css|less)$": "<rootDir>/src/jest-config/styleMock.js",
      "\\.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|eot|otf|webp|svg|ttf|woff|woff2|mp4|webm|wav|mp3|m4a|aac|oga)$": "<rootDir>/src/jest-config/fileMock.js"
    },
    "transform": {
      "^.+\\.(ts|html)$": "ts-jest",
      "^.+\\.js$": "babel-jest"
    },
    "moduleFileExtensions": [
      "ts",
      "tsx",
      "js",
      "jsx",
      "json",
      "node",
      ".html"
    ]
  }
}

We need to make some changes to some of the files that @angular/cli added when the project was instantiated earlier. More specifically tsconfig.spec.json,tsconfig.json and tsconfig.app.json.

In your tsconfig.spec.json add the following keys and values to the compilerOptions:

{
 "compilerOptions": {
  ....
  "module": "commonjs",
  "allowJs": true,
  }
}

You'll also need to change the types to the following:

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "types": ["jest", "jquery", "jsdom", "node"]
  }
}

Moving onto tsconfig.json. Once again under compilerOptions add the following key and value emitDecoratorMetadata: true

And finally in tsconfig.app.json add a reference to the folder you've created earlier to the exclude, turning its contents into:

{
  "exclude": ["src/test.ts", "src/**/*.spec.ts", "**/*.stories.ts", "src/jest-config"]
}

We're almost done, only three more changes are required to finish setting up Jest with Angular and Storybook.

Add the following key and value to your .storybook/tsconfig.json:

{
  ...
  "compilerOptions": {
    "skipLibCheck": true,
    ....
  },
  ...
}

We need a script to run our tests, add the following script to your package.json to allow jest to run:

{
  ....
  "scripts":{
    ...
     "jest": "jest --watch"
  }
}

And finally update the test file that was created automatically when the project was initialized, more specifically src/app/app.component.spec.ts to:

import { render } from '@testing-library/angular';
import { AppComponent } from './app.component';

describe('AppComponent', () => {
  it('should render the component', async () => {
    const { getByText } = await render(AppComponent);
    expect(getByText('Welcome'));
  });
});

Now we can quickly check that the various environments of our application are working properly:

# Run the test runner (Jest) in a terminal (we will add Jest along the way):
npm run jest

# Start the component explorer on port 6006:
npm run storybook

# Run the frontend app proper on port 4200:
npm run start

Our three frontend app modalities: automated test (Jest), component development (Storybook), and the app itself.

Depending on what part of the app you’re working on, you may want to run one or more of these simultaneously. Since our current focus is creating a single UI component, we’ll stick with running Storybook.

Reuse CSS

Taskbox reuses design elements from the GraphQL and React Tutorial example app, so we won’t need to write CSS in this tutorial. Copy and paste this compiled CSS into the src/styles.css file.

And make a small change to allow the icons in the percolate font to be correctly displayed with Angular.

@font-face {
  font-family: 'percolate';
  src: url('/assets/icon/percolate.eot?-5w3um4');
  src: url('/assets/icon/percolate.eot?#iefix5w3um4') format('embedded-opentype'), url('/assets/icon/percolate.woff?5w3um4')
      format('woff'), url('/assets/icon/percolate.ttf?5w3um4') format('truetype'), url('/assets/icon/percolate.svg?5w3um4')
      format('svg');
  font-weight: normal;
  font-style: normal;
}

Add assets

To match the intended design, you'll need to download both the font and icon directories and place its contents inside your src/assets folder. Issue the following commands in your terminal:

npx degit chromaui/learnstorybook-code/src/assets/font src/assets/font
npx degit chromaui/learnstorybook-code/src/assets/icon src/assets/icon

After adding styling and assets, the app will render a bit strangely. That’s OK. We aren’t working on the app right now.

Commit changes

When our project was initialized Angular's CLI already created a local repository for us. At this stage it's safe to add our files to the first commit.

Run the following commands to add and commit the changes we've done so far.

$ git add .

Followed by:

$ git commit -m "first commit"

That's it. Let's start building our first component!