soho-ui-library

A skeleton to create your own React component library using Rollup, TypeScript, and Storybook

Usage no npm install needed!

<script type="module">
  import sohoUiLibrary from 'https://cdn.skypack.dev/soho-ui-library';
</script>

README

React Component Library

This project skeleton was created to help people get started with creating their own React component library using:

It also features:

Development

Testing

npm run test

Building

npm run build

Storybook

To run a live-reload Storybook server on your local machine:

npm run storybook

To export your Storybook as static files:

npm run storybook:export

You can then serve the files under storybook-static using S3, GitHub pages, Express etc.

Generating New Components

I've included a handy NodeJS util file under util called create-component.js. Instead of copy pasting components to create a new component, you can instead run this command to generate all the files you need to start building out a new component. To use it:

npm run generate YourComponentName

This will generate:

/src
  /YourComponentName
    YourComponentName.tsx
    YourComponentName.stories.tsx
    YourComponentName.test.tsx
    YourComponentName.types.ts
    YourComponentName.scss

The default templates for each file can be modified under util/templates.

Don't forget to add the component to your index.ts exports if you want the library to export the component!

Installing Component Library Locally

Let's say you have another project (test-app) on your machine that you want to try installing the component library into without having to first publish the component library. In the test-app directory, you can run:

npm i --save ../react-component-library

which will install the local component library as a dependency in test-app. It'll then appear as a dependency in package.json like:

  ...
  "dependencies": {
    ...
    "react-component-library": "file:../react-component-library",
    ...
  },
  ...

Your components can then be imported and used in that project.

Publishing

Hosting via NPM

First, make sure you have an NPM account and are logged into NPM using the npm login command.

Then update the name field in package.json to reflect your NPM package name in your private or public NPM registry. Then run:

npm publish

The "prepublishOnly": "npm run build" script in package.json will execute before publish occurs, ensuring the build/ directory and the compiled component library exist.

Hosting via GitHub

I recommend you host the component library using NPM. However, if you don't want to use NPM, you can use GitHub to host it instead.

You'll need to remove build/ from .gitignore, build the component library (npm run build), add, commit and push the contents of build. See this branch for an example.

You can then install your library into other projects by running:

npm i --save git+https://github.com/HarveyD/react-component-library.git#branch-name

OR

npm i --save github:harveyd/react-component-library#branch-name

Usage

Let's say you created a public NPM package called harvey-component-library with the TestComponent component created in this repository.

Usage of the component (after the library installed as a dependency into another project) will be:

import React from "react";
import { TestComponent } from "harvey-component-library";

const App = () => (
  <div className="app-container">
    <h1>Hello I'm consuming the component library</h1>
    <TestComponent theme="primary" />
  </div>
);

export default App;

Check out this Code Sandbox for a live example.

Additional Help

Styled Components

If you want to use styled-components, the changes required are a bit more involved. As such, I've created a branch where I've got styled-components working in this component library, check it out here.

Component Code Splitting

Code splitting of your components is not supported by default.

Read this section of my blog post to find out how and why you would enable code splitting of your components. In summary, code splitting enables users to import components in isolation like:

import TestComponent from 'harvey-component-library/build/TestComponent';

This can reduce the bundle size for projects using older (CJS) module formats.

You can check out this branch or this commit to see what changes are neccesary to implement it.

Supporting Image Imports

Add the following library to your component library @rollup/plugin-image:

npm i -D @rollup/plugin-image

Then add it to rollup-config.js:

...
plugins:[
  ...,
  image(),
  ...
]
...

You can then import and render images in your components like:

import logo from './rollup.png';

export const ImageComponent = () => (
    <div>
        <img src={logo} />
    </div>
);

Supporting JSON Imports

Add the following library to your component library @rollup/plugin-json:

npm i -D @rollup/plugin-json

Then add it to rollup-config.js:

...
plugins:[
  ...,
  json(),
  ...
]
...

You can then import and use JSON as ES6 Modules:

import data from './some-data.json';

export const JsonDataComponent = () => <div>{data.description}</div>;

Checkout the official Rollup plugin list for additional helpful plugins.