Storybook for React 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 React; other editions exist for React Native, Vue, Angular and Svelte.
Setup React 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 Create React App (CRA) 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 create-react-app taskbox
cd taskbox
# Add Storybook:
npx -p @storybook/cli sb init
yarn to run the majority of our commands.
If you have Yarn installed, but prefer to use npm instead, don't worry, you can still go through the tutorial without any issues. Just add the --use-npm flag to the first command above and both CRA and Storybook will initialize based on this. Also while you progress through the tutorial, don't forget to adjust the commands used to their npm counterparts.
We can quickly check that the various environments of our application are working properly:
# Run the test runner (Jest) in a terminal:
yarn test --watchAll
# Start the component explorer on port 9009:
yarn storybook
# Run the frontend app proper on port 3000:
yarn start
--watchAll flag to our test command, don't worry it's intentional, this small change will ensure that all tests run and everything is ok with our application. While you progress through this tutorial you will be introduced to different test scenarios, so probably you might want to consider and add the flag to your test script in your package.json to ensure your entire test suite runs.
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/index.css file.
Add assets
To match the intended design, you'll need to download both the font and icon directories and place its contents inside your public folder.
We’ve used svn (Subversion) to easily download a folder of files from GitHub. If you don’t have subversion installed or want to just do it manually, you can grab the folders directly here.
svn export https://github.com/chromaui/learnstorybook-code/branches/master/public/icon public/icon
svn export https://github.com/chromaui/learnstorybook-code/branches/master/public/font public/font
After adding styling and assets, the app will render a bit strangely. That’s OK. We aren’t working on the app right now. We’re starting off with building our first component!