babel-plugin-emotion

What is babel-plugin-emotion?

The babel-plugin-emotion npm package is designed to enhance the development experience when using Emotion, a popular CSS-in-JS library. It provides optimizations and custom transformations for styles defined in JavaScript, enabling more efficient and powerful styling solutions in React applications. This plugin facilitates the use of Emotion by offering features such as source maps for easier debugging, auto-labeling for better readability of class names, and the optimization of styles for production.

What are babel-plugin-emotion's main functionalities?

Source Maps

Generates source maps for styles, improving the debugging process by allowing developers to trace back to the original location of a style definition within their code.

"use strict";

var _emotion = require("@emotion/core");

function App() {
  return /*#__PURE__*/_emotion.jsx("div", {
    css: {
      color: 'hotpink'
    }
  }, "Hello World");
}

Auto-labeling

Automatically adds labels to the generated class names based on the name of the variable or component. This enhances readability in the DOM and helps in identifying components during debugging.

"use strict";

var _emotion = require("@emotion/core");

var _styled = /*#__PURE__*/(0, _emotion.default)("div")
/*#__PURE__*/
.emotionLabel('MyComponent_styled_h1nx9f');

Optimization for Production

In production, the plugin optimizes the styles by compacting and efficient handling, reducing the size of the generated CSS and improving load times.

process.env.NODE_ENV === 'production' ? /*#__PURE__*/require('@emotion/css').css('label:MyComponent;', 'color:hotpink;') : /*#__PURE__*/require('@emotion/css').css('color:hotpink;');

Other packages similar to babel-plugin-emotion

styled-components

Styled-components is another CSS-in-JS library that allows for styling applications using tagged template literals. While it offers similar functionality in terms of defining styles within JavaScript, it differs in syntax and the way styles are applied. Styled-components focuses on creating styled components without the need for a separate CSS file, whereas babel-plugin-emotion enhances the Emotion library's capabilities with additional compile-time optimizations and features.

babel-plugin-styled-components

This plugin is specifically designed for styled-components, offering similar compile-time enhancements as babel-plugin-emotion but for styled-components. It includes features like server-side rendering optimizations, better debugging with readable class names, and minification of styles for production. The comparison lies in the focus of each plugin on its respective CSS-in-JS library, providing tailored optimizations and developer experience improvements.

README

babel-plugin-emotion

Babel plugin for the minification and optimization of emotion styles.

babel-plugin-emotion is highly recommended, but not required in version 8 and above of emotion.

Features

Feature/Syntax	Native	Babel Plugin Required	Notes
css``	✅
css(...)	✅		Generally used for object styles.
styled('div')`` syntax	✅		Both string and object styles work without this plugin.
styled.div`` syntax		✅	Supporting the shortcut syntax without the Babel plugin requires a large list of valid elements to be included in the bundle.
components as selectors		✅	Allows an emotion component to be used as a CSS selector.
Minification		✅	Any leading/trailing space between properties in your css and styled blocks is removed. This can reduce the size of your final bundle.
Dead Code Elimination		✅	Uglifyjs will use the injected /*#__PURE__*/ flag comments to mark your css and styled blocks as candidates for dead code elimination.
Static Extraction		✅	Generated CSS that is eligible for extraction can be moved to an external css file.
Source Maps		✅	When enabled, navigate directly to the style declaration in your javascript file.
css as Prop		✅	Convenient helper for calling css and appending the generated className during compile time.
Contextual Class Names		✅	Generated class names include the name of the variable or component they were defined in.

Example

In

const myStyles = css`
  font-size: 20px;
  @media (min-width: 420px) {
    color: blue;
    ${css`
      width: 96px;
      height: 96px;
    `};
    line-height: 26px;
  }
  background: green;
  ${{ backgroundColor: 'hotpink' }};
`

Out

const myStyles = /* #__PURE__ */ css(
  'font-size:20px;@media(min-width:420px){color:blue;',
  /* #__PURE__ */ css('width:96px;height:96px;'),
  ';line-height:26px;}background:green;',
  { backgroundColor: 'hotpink' },
  ';'
)

Installation

yarn add --dev babel-plugin-emotion

or if you prefer npm

npm install --save-dev babel-plugin-emotion

Usage

Via .babelrc (Recommended)

.babelrc

Without options:

{
  "plugins": ["emotion"]
}

With options:

Defaults Shown

{
  "plugins": [
    [
      "emotion",
      {
        "hoist": false,
        "sourceMap": false,
        "autoLabel": false,
        "extractStatic": false,
        "importedNames": {
          "styled": "styled",
          "css": "css",
          "keyframes": "keyframes",
          "injectGlobal": "injectGlobal",
          "merge": "merge"
        }
      }
    ]
  ]
}

Recommended Setup

Use Babel's env property

.babelrc

{
  "env": {
    "production": {
      "plugins": [["emotion", { "hoist": true }]]
    },
    "development": {
      "plugins": [
        ["emotion", { "sourceMap": true, "autoLabel": true }]
      ]
    }
  }
}

Via CLI

babel --plugins babel-plugin-emotion script.js

Via Node API

require('@babel/core').transform('code', {
  plugins: ['babel-plugin-emotion']
})

Options

hoist

boolean, defaults to false.

This option enables the following:

• Any argument supplied to css or styled is hoisted.

By hoisting the argument, or assigning the value to a variable, emotion is able to leverage the use of a WeakMapcache to increase performance. Users of object styles with css prop will benefit the most from enabling this option.

In

const Sample = () => <div css={{ background: 'brown' }} />

Out

var _css = require('emotion').css;
var _ref = { background: 'brown' };

const Sample = () => <div className={_css(_ref)} />;

sourceMap

boolean, defaults to false.

This option enables the following:

• Injected source maps for use in browser dev tools

Documentation

autoLabel

boolean, defaults to false.

This option enables the following:

• Automatically adds the label property to styles so that class names generated by css or styled include the name of the variable the result is assigned to.

css

In

const brownStyles = css({ color: 'brown' })

Out

const brownStyles = /*#__PURE__*/ css({ color: 'blue' }, 'label:brownStyles;')

brownStyles's value would be css-1q8eu9e-brownStyles

styled

In

const Profile = () => {
  const H1 = styled.h1({
    borderRadius: '50%',
    transition: 'transform 400ms ease-in-out',
    boxSizing: 'border-box',
    display: 'flex',
    ':hover': {
      transform: 'scale(1.2)'
    }
  })
}

Out

const Profile = () => {
  const H1 = /*#__PURE__*/ styled('h1', {
    label: 'H1'
  })({
    borderRadius: '50%',
    transition: 'transform 400ms ease-in-out',
    boxSizing: 'border-box',
    display: 'flex',
    ':hover': {
      transform: 'scale(1.2)'
    }
  })
}

H1's class name attribute would be css-13djram-H1

extractStatic

boolean, defaults to false.

This option enables the following:

• Extract static styles into CSS files.

Documentation

importedNames

object, defaults to

{
  "styled": "styled",
  "css": "css",
  "keyframes": "keyframes",
  "injectGlobal": "injectGlobal",
  "merge": "merge"
}

This option enables the following:

• Configurable import names

Documentation

instances

Array<string>, defaults to

['emotion', 'react-emotion', 'preact-emotion']

This option allows babel-plugin-emotion to know which imports to treat as emotion imports and transform as such. This option is only required if you use a custom instance of emotion created with create-emotion or you're importing emotion from somewhere other than the paths above. Relative paths are resolved relative to process.cwd()(the current working directory).

Documentation

primaryInstance

string, defaults to

'emotion'

This option allows babel-plugin-emotion to know where to import emotion from when it needs to import emotion. Currently this is only used for the css prop to import css and merge but it could be used for other purposes in the future so it's recommend to make sure that this instance exports everything returned from createEmotion, an up-to-date example of this can be found in the emotion package's source.

Documentation

Babel Macros

Instead of using babel-plugin-emotion, you can use emotion with babel-plugin-macros. Add babel-plugin-macros to your babel config and import whatever you want from emotion but add /macro to the end. Currently every API except for the css prop is supported by the macro.

import styled from 'react-emotion/macro'
import {
  css,
  keyframes,
  injectGlobal,
  flush,
  hydrate
} from 'emotion/macro'

create-react-app issue discussing macros.