This article was originally published in the DEV Community.
styled-components
helps you write better CSS in React. It does so by allowing you to wrap all your component's styles into a neat, style-only component.
So, instead of this:
.wrapper {
font-family: sans-serif;
}
.button {
background: #2b2b2b;
color: white;
font-size: 24px;
padding: 12px;
cursor: pointer;
}
and this
import React from "react";
import "./styles.css";
export default function App() {
return (
<div class="Wrapper">
<button class="Button">Hello, I am a Button</button>
</div>
);
}
You have something like that:
import React from "react";
import styled from "styled-components";
const Wrapper = styled.div`
font-family: sans-serif;
`;
const Button = styled.button`
background: #2b2b2b;
color: white;
font-size: 24px;
padding: 12px;
cursor: pointer;
`;
export default function App() {
return (
<Wrapper>
<Button>Hello, I am a Button</Button>
</Wrapper>
);
}
Which might not look like a big change. I know, I know! It looks like all that we did here was merge two files into a single one...
However, by doing so we integrated our styles into styled-components
and now that the library controls our CSS it can do all kinds of cool stuff like:
- Automatic inject critical CSS
- Automatic vendor prefixing
- Theming and dynamic styling
This saves us a lot of time and allows us to focus on important stuff like adding borders to buttons and stuff like that.
Now, after this brief introduction to the wonders of styled-components
, let's focus on the dynamic styling part.
Dynamic styling with styled-components
#
The point of dynamic styling is saving time and writing less CSS.
Imagine that you have a primary and a secondary button. They are very similar, but you want your primary button to have a flashy color so people actually click on it.
You can do that by adding a primary
attribute to your <Button />
...
export default function App() {
return (
<Wrapper>
<Button>Hello, I am a Button</Button>
<Button primary>Hello, I am a Primary Button</Button>
</Wrapper>
);
}
...and handling that new attribute on your styled component, exactly like you would with component props!
const Button = styled.button`
background: ${(props) => (props.primary ? "#6495ED" : "#2b2b2b")};
color: white;
font-size: 24px;
padding: 12px;
cursor: pointer;
`;
"But what if my component needs a lot of customization?" #
It may happen that your buttons need to be extra flexible, while still sharing some basic styles. Maybe you need to have a primary button that also has rounded corners and a fancy box-shadow.
You can do that by applying the same logic as the earlier example. But that can get quite repetitive, look:
const Button = styled.button`
background: ${(props) => (props.primary ? "#6495ED" : "#2b2b2b")};
border-radius: ${(props) => (props.round ? "4px" : "0")};
box-shadow: ${(props) =>
props.shadow ? "2px 2px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5)" : "none"};
color: white;
font-size: 24px;
padding: 12px;
cursor: pointer;
`;
What you can do here instead is "lift" the props and do something like that:
const Button = styled.button(
({ primary, round, shadow }) => `
background: ${primary ? "#6495ED" : "#2b2b2b"};
border-radius: ${round ? "4px" : "0"};
box-shadow: ${shadow ? "2px 2px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5)" : "none"};
color: white;
font-size: 24px;
padding: 12px;
cursor: pointer;
`
);
That way, instead of "importing" each prop on a per-line basis, you do it at the very beginning of your styles, so you can be 100% sure of what makes it dynamic!
Just keep in mind that while this technique is cool and makes your styled components look leaner, needing extensive customization might be a sign of bad abstraction.
So before adding a fourth (or fifth) dynamic style rule, make sure that you shouldn't really be creating a new styled component!
And this is it for the day. Thanks for reading!
I wrote this article (at the eleventh hour) for Hashnode Bootcamp II first assignment.
Make sure to check all the other Bootcamp articles and follow me on Twitter!