@storybook/react

What is @storybook/react?

@storybook/react is a development environment for UI components. It allows developers to create components independently and showcase components interactively in an isolated development environment. Storybook helps in building UI components in isolation from the business logic and context of the app, which makes it easier to develop hard-to-reach states and edge cases.

What are @storybook/react's main functionalities?

Component Story Format (CSF)

CSF is an ES Module-based standard for defining component examples. This format is simple and portable. Developers can write their component stories in plain JavaScript objects.

import React from 'react';
import { Button } from './Button';

export default {
  title: 'Example/Button',
  component: Button,
};

const Template = (args) => <Button {...args} />;

export const Primary = Template.bind({});
Primary.args = {
  primary: true,
  label: 'Button',
};

Addons

Addons are essentially plugins that extend Storybook's core functionalities. With addons, developers can add features like knobs to dynamically change props, accessibility checks, and story source code display.

import { withKnobs, text, boolean, number } from '@storybook/addon-knobs';

export default {
  title: 'Example/Button',
  decorators: [withKnobs],
};

export const DynamicVariables = () => {
  const name = text('Name', 'Aragon');
  const age = number('Age', 30);
  const content = `I am ${name} and I'm ${age} years old.`;
  return <div>{content}</div>;
};

Controls

Controls give the ability to interact with a component's arguments dynamically without needing to code. It's a more robust version of the addon-knobs but built into Storybook by default.

export default {
  title: 'Example/Button',
  component: Button,
  argTypes: {
    backgroundColor: { control: 'color' },
    size: {
      control: { type: 'select', options: ['small', 'medium', 'large'] },
    },
  },
};

export const Primary = (args) => <Button {...args} />;
Primary.args = {
  primary: true,
  label: 'Button',
};

Other packages similar to @storybook/react

react-cosmos

React Cosmos is a development tool for creating reusable React components. It scans your project for components and enables you to render components with any context or state. Compared to @storybook/react, React Cosmos focuses more on the component's lifecycle and state rather than the component's variations.

docz

Docz leverages MDX files to help you document your components easily. It's more focused on documentation than interactive development. Unlike @storybook/react, Docz provides a more straightforward approach to documenting components using markdown, but it lacks some of the interactive development features that Storybook offers.

README

Storybook React renderer