babel-plugin-styled-components

What is babel-plugin-styled-components?

The babel-plugin-styled-components npm package is a plugin for Babel that improves the development and user experience when using styled-components. It provides better debugging, server-side rendering support, minification of styles, and other enhancements.

What are babel-plugin-styled-components's main functionalities?

Improved debugging

This feature adds readable class names to your styled components, making it easier to debug your styles in the browser's dev tools.

/* Before using the plugin */
const Button = styled.button`color: blue;`;
/* After using the plugin, the class name includes the component name */
// <button class="Button-sc-__sc-1vu0deq-0 gKZCfK" />

Server-side rendering

It ensures that server-side rendering of styles is consistent with client-side rendering, preventing checksum mismatches and improving performance.

/* The plugin adds unique identifiers to the styles which helps with consistent rehydration of server-side rendered styles to the client. */

Minification

This feature minifies the styles by removing comments and whitespace, leading to a smaller bundle size and faster load times.

/* The plugin can remove comments and whitespace from your CSS to reduce payload size. */

Preprocessing

The plugin allows you to write your styles with nesting and other preprocessing features, which it then converts into valid CSS.

/* You can write your styles in a nested manner similar to Sass, and the plugin will preprocess it into valid CSS. */
const Button = styled.button`
  color: blue;
  &:hover {
    color: red;
  }
`;

Other packages similar to babel-plugin-styled-components

babel-plugin-emotion

This package is similar to babel-plugin-styled-components but is tailored for the Emotion library. It offers source maps, SSR support, and other optimizations specific to Emotion.

README

babel-plugin-styled-components

This plugin is a highly recommended supplement to the base styled-components library, offering some useful features:

• consistently hashed component classNames between environments (a must for server-side rendering)
• automatic library usage tweaks that allow for some bytes to be dropped from your bundle
• better debugging through automatic annotation of your styled components based on their context in the file system, etc.
• various types of minification for styles and the tagged template literals styled-components uses

Quick start

Install the plugin first:

npm install --save-dev babel-plugin-styled-components

Then add it to your babel configuration:

{
  "plugins": ["babel-plugin-styled-components"]
}

Documentation

The documentation for this plugin lives on the styled-components website!

• Usage
• Better debugging
• Minification

License

Licensed under the MIT License, Copyright © 2016-present Vladimir Danchenkov and Maximilian Stoiber.

See LICENSE.md for more information.