As developers, one of the challenges we face is organizing and showcasing our components effectively. This is where Storybook comes in handy. Storybook is an open-source tool that allows us to build and document our UI components in isolation.

In this blog post, we’ll dive into using Storybook to create compositions with layouts and templates, making our component library even more powerful.

Installation and Setup

Before we get started, make sure you have Storybook installed in your project. If not, you can install it by running the following command:

npm install @storybook/react --save-dev

Once installed, you’ll need to set up a configuration file for Storybook. Create a .storybook directory in the root of your project and add a main.js file inside it. In this file, you can configure Storybook to suit your project’s needs.

Creating Layout Components

To create a layout component, we can use Storybook’s storiesOf API. This allows us to define stories for each variant of our layout component. For example, if we have a Header component with different variants, we can define stories like this:

import React from 'react';
import { storiesOf } from '@storybook/react';

import Header from '../components/Header';

storiesOf('Layouts/Header', module)
  .add('Default', () => <Header />)
  .add('With Logo', () => <Header showLogo />)
  .add('With Menu', () => <Header showMenu />)
  .add('With Logo and Menu', () => <Header showLogo showMenu />);

Each story represents a variant of the Header component. This allows us to visualize and test the different configurations of our layout component in Storybook.

Building Templates

Templates are higher-level components that use layouts to build a complete page or section. We can define templates using Storybook as well. Let’s create a LoginPage template as an example:

import React from 'react';
import { storiesOf } from '@storybook/react';

import Header from '../components/Header';
import LoginForm from '../components/LoginForm';

storiesOf('Templates/LoginPage', module).add('Default', () => (
  <>
    <Header />
    <LoginForm />
  </>
));

By combining the Header layout component and the LoginForm component, we create a LoginPage template. This allows us to see how our components integrate and how they look in a real-life scenario.

Storybook Addons for Layouts and Templates

Storybook provides addons that enhance the functionality and usability of our component library. Two useful addons for managing layouts and templates are @storybook/addon-viewport and @storybook/addon-knobs.

The @storybook/addon-viewport addon allows us to switch between different screen sizes and resolutions in Storybook. This helps us ensure our layouts are responsive and adapt well to different devices.

The @storybook/addon-knobs addon allows us to interact with our components directly in Storybook. We can modify prop values and see the changes instantly, making it easier to test different configurations of our layouts and templates.

Conclusion

Storybook is an invaluable tool for building and documenting UI components. By utilizing layouts and templates, we can effectively showcase the different configurations and combinations of our components.

In this blog post, we explored how to create layout components and build templates using Storybook. We also discovered addons like @storybook/addon-viewport and @storybook/addon-knobs that enhance the functionality of our component library.

#storybook #componentlibrary