@kong/design-tokens

Kong UI Design Tokens

Kong's Design Tokens and Style Dictionary, created with Style Dictionary.

Note: Repository and documentation is a work in progress. This package is currently for Kong internal-use only, but is published publicly in order to consume in our OSS projects.

A Style Dictionary is a build system that allows you to define styles once, in a way for any platform or language to consume. A single place to create and edit your styles, and a single command exports these rules to all the places you need them - iOS, Android, CSS, JS, HTML, sketch files, style documentation, or anything you can think of.

• Tokens
  • Token Requirements
  • Package Exports
• Usage
  • Installation
  • Standalone components
  • Host applications
• Updating Tokens & Local Development
  • Development Sandbox
  • Lint and fix
  • Build for production
  • VS Code extension
  • Token Update Workflow
  • Committing Changes
  • Package Publishing

Tokens

All design tokens must be placed inside of the /tokens directory in one of two sub-directories.

Directory	Description
/tokens/alias	The alias directory must only contain alias values that point directly to a raw CSS value. Any tokens defined within the alias directory will not be exposed in the package exports.
/tokens/source	The source directory contains all tokens that will be available for consumption from the package exports.

Token Requirements

• Tokens must be defined in the corresponding JSON files within the /tokens directory

  • The category of each token should be its own directory.
  • Each type of token should be a file in the category directory, named {type}.json
  • If there is only a single type of token within a category, you should name the file index.json

• Token keys must be lowercase and snake_case

• Token keys must be defined in normal alphabetical order

• Tokens defined in the /tokens/source/ directory WILL be exported in the build files.

• Tokens defined in the /tokens/alias/ directory can be utilized/referenced within the /tokens/source/ files; however, these tokens will NOT be exported in the build files.

• Token aliases (e.g. color aliases) must not be exposed/exported from the production build

• Component tokens must be defined within the /tokens/source/components directory. All tokens for a component should be defined in a single JSON file, {component-name}.json

• Tokens at the "root" of their structure must be defined with a key of "_" to allow for nested child tokens. Example:

  Click to view an example of root-level tokens

  {
    "color": {
      "text": {
        "_": {
          "comment": "blue-100",
          "value": "{color.alias.blue.100}"
        },
        "neutral": {
          "_": {
            "comment": "gray-100",
            "value": "{color.alias.gray.60}"
          },
          "strong": {
            "comment": "gray-70",
            "value": "{color.alias.gray.70}"
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
  

  /* Output */
  --kui-color-text: #000933;
  --kui-color-text-neutral: #6c7489;
  --kui-color-text-neutral-strong: #52596e;
  

Package Exports

This package exports Kong's design tokens in multiple formats:

• JavaScript tokens (ESM and CJS), along with corresponding TypeScript types
• SCSS variables

Usage

Installation

In your host project, install the package only as a devDependency:

yarn add -D @kong/design-tokens

Why a devDependency?

This package is intended to be consumed by a host component or application that will be compiled before publishing. This means when the component or app is compiled, any tokens it consumes (e.g. SCSS tokens, JavaScript variables, etc.) will be replaced during the build with the static token value.

This strategy alleviates the need for a consuming application to need to install the @kong/design-tokens package when using a component that utilizes the tokens under-the-hood.

Standalone components

The primary consideration when using Kong's design tokens in components is to determine if the component needs to allow for downstream customization.

If your component does not need to offer any customization, only utilize the SCSS and JavaScript design tokens in your component.

If your component does want to offer customization, you will want to reference CSS variables with a fallback value.

As an example, in Kong's Kongponents Vue component library, we want to offer deep levels of customization to allow for an external host application to override component styles. Enabling customization is easy by using Kong's Design System's CSS variables with the SCSS variable as the fallback.

<style lang="scss">
// Import SCSS variables
@import "@kong/design-tokens/tokens/scss/variables";

.my-component-class {
  color: var(--kui-color-text-primary, $kui-color-text-primary);
  font-weight: var(--kui-font-weight-semibold, $kui-font-weight-semibold);
  padding: var(--kui-space-20, $kui-space-20) var(--kui-space-40, $kui-space-40);
}
</style>

Inspecting the example above, you will notice that we fist import the SCSS variables. We then set each style property to the CSS variable, using the SCSS static variable as the fallback.

Important: notice we did not import the CSS variables.

When Kongponents are imported and used in a host application, the components will utilize the SCSS fallback values by default since the CSS variables are undefined. This is the normal usage and works great for most applications.

If your application wants to customize some of the properties, it's easy by simply defining the CSS variables you want to override inside of your host application, as shown here:

<style>
// You may scope the variable to `root:` to impact the whole application...
:root {
  --kui-color-text-primary: green;
}

// ...or scope the variable to a specific container to keep the changes isolated
table .my-table-row {
  --kui-color-text-primary: purple;
}
</style>

Now that we have set a value for the CSS variable --kui-color-text-primary in our host application, any instance of this CSS variable in the components will utilize our custom value instead of the default value.

Host applications

Most commonly, a host application should utilize the SCSS and/or JavaScript variables to define its styles. Host applications typically do not need to be customized after compile time, meaning there is no reason to use the CSS variables with fallbacks. Here's an example:

<style lang="scss">
// Import SCSS variables
@import "@kong/design-tokens/tokens/scss/variables";

.my-app-custom-class {
  color: $kui-color-text-primary;
  font-weight: $kui-font-weight-semibold;
  padding: $kui-space-20 $kui-space-40;
}
</style>

Server-Side Rendering (SSR)

If your host application utilizes SSR, you may need to resolve aliases to the package exports.

For example, for a VitePress site, add the following to your vite.config.ts

export default defineConfig({
  resolve: {
    alias: {
      // Explicitly alias the SCSS file since we are overriding the default import below
      '@kong/design-tokens/tokens/scss/variables': path.resolve(__dirname, '../node_modules/@kong/design-tokens/dist/tokens/scss/variables.scss'),
      // Alias `@kong/design-tokens` imports to specifically utilize the esm build
      '@kong/design-tokens': path.resolve(__dirname, '../node_modules/@kong/design-tokens/dist/tokens/js/'),
    },
  },
})

Updating Tokens & Local Development

To get started, install the package dependencies

yarn install --frozen-lockfile

Development Sandbox

This repository includes a Vue sandbox (see the /sandbox directory) to allow you to experiment with consuming tokens.

To start the sandbox:

yarn sandbox

This command will simultaneously start the Vite dev server and initialize a watcher on the /tokens directory. If any files in the /tokens directory are modified, the sandbox will automatically run the build command to update the tokens and then restart the Vite dev server (simulating hot module reload).

Updating any files within the sandbox itself will also trigger hot module reload as expected.

Lint and fix

Lint package files, and optionally auto-fix detected issues.

# Lint only
yarn lint

# Lint and fix
yarn lint:fix

Build for production

Utilize the style-dictionary CLI to build the token assets for production based on the configuration in /config.js.

yarn build

If additional sub-directories (other than dist/tokens) are added to the dist/ directory in /config.js, you will also need to create a new corresponding entry in the package.json > exports section to allow for importing into the host project without dist/ in the path.

For example, if I want to add a new my-feature folder, I'd update the exports entry as shown here:

"exports": {
  "./package.json": "./package.json",
  "./tokens/*": "./dist/tokens/*",
  "./my-feature/*": "./dist/my-feature/*" // New directory
}

VS Code extension

To get auto-completion of the SCSS variables in your project, you can add the SCSS IntelliSense extension to VS Code on your machine along with the corresponding settings object which will auto-import the variables for auto-completion:

// settings.json
{
  "scss.scannerExclude": [
    "**/.git",
    "**/bower_components",
    "**/node_modules/!(@kong/design-tokens),"
  ]
}

Token Update Workflow

1. Ensure you are on the main branch, then pull down the latest code by running git checkout main && git pull origin main
2. Checkout a new branch for your changes with git checkout -b {type}/{jira-ticket}-{description} - as an example, git checkout feat/khcp-1234-add-color-tokens
3. Add/edit the tokens in the /tokens directory as needed, ensuring to adhere to the Token Requirements
4. Before committing your changes, locally run yarn lint to ensure you do not have any linting errors. If you have errors, you can try running yarn lint:fix to resolve
5. Commit your changes, adhering to Conventional Commits. To make this easier, you're encouraged to run yarn commit to help build your commit message
6. Push your branch up to the remote with git push origin {branch-name}
7. Open a pull request and request a review

Committing Changes

This repo uses Conventional Commits.

Commitizen and Commitlint are used to help build and enforce commit messages.

It is highly recommended to use the following command in order to create your commits:

yarn commit

This will trigger the Commitizen interactive prompt for building your commit message.

Enforcing Commit Format

Lefthook is used to manage Git Hooks within the repo.

• A commit-msg hook is automatically setup that enforces commit message stands with commitlint, see lefthook.yml
• A pre-push hook is used that runs eslint before allowing you to push your changes to the repository

Additionally, CI will use commitlint to validate the commits associated with a PR in the Lint and Validate job.

Package Publishing

This repository utilizes Semantic Release for automated package publishing and version updates.