🍷 Dripsy
A dead-simple, responsive design system for Expo / React Native Web. Heavily inspired by React's theme-ui
.
<Text
sx={{
fontSize: [14, 16, 20],
color: ['primary', null, 'accent'],
}}
>
Responsive font size?? 🤯
</Text>
Features
- Responsive styles
- Universal (Android, iOS, Web)
- Works with Expo
- Works with Next.js / server-side rendering (experimental)
- Full theme support
- Custom theme variants
- TypeScript support (TypeScript theme support is in the works too)
- Insanely simple API (themed, responsive designs in one line!)
- Works with Animated/Reanimated values
- Dark mode / custom color modes
🤔 Why?
Build once, deploy everywhere, is a great philosophy made possible by Expo Web/React Native Web. A large impediment is responsive design.
React Native doesn't have media queries for styles, and trying to micmick it with JS turns into useState
hell with a ton of conditionals (as you'll see below.)
While React Native has some great component libraries, it lacks a good design system that is responsive and themed.
No longer. The goal of Dripsy is to let you go from idea to universal, themed styles without much effort.
There is no shortage of discussion about what responsive design should look like in React Native.
After trying many, many different ways, I'm convinced this approach is the answer. I'm curious to see if you'll think the same.
🙉 Installation
yarn add dripsy
npm i dripsy
If you're using Next.js / the experimental SSR mode:
yarn add styled-components
🛠 Set up
Technically, you don't have to do anything else!
However, you'll likely want to create a custom theme.
Custom theme
Wrap your entire app with the ThemeProvider
, and pass it a theme
object. Make sure you create your theme outside of the component to avoid re-renders.
If you're using Next.js, this goes in pages/_app.js
. Also, you should pass the options={{ ssr: true }}
prop to the ThemeProvider
.
App.js
import { ThemeProvider } from 'dripsy';
const theme = {
colors: {
text: '#000',
background: '#fff',
primary: 'tomato',
},
fonts: {
body: 'system-ui, sans-serif',
heading: '"Avenir Next", sans-serif',
},
spacing: [10, 12, 14],
};
export default function App() {
return (
<ThemeProvider theme={theme}>
{/* Your app code goes here! */}
</ThemeProvider>
);
}
Follow the docs from theme-ui
to see how to theme your app – we use the same API as them.
My personal preference is to have the entire theme object in one file.
All theme values are optional. You don't have to use them if you don't want.
For Next.js apps
If you're using the expo + next.js integration, there are a few extra steps.
1. Install dependencies
yarn add next-compose-plugins next-transpile-modules
2. Edit your next.config.js
file to look like this:
const withPlugins = require('next-compose-plugins');
const withTM = require('next-transpile-modules')([
'dripsy',
]);
const { withExpo } = require('@expo/next-adapter');
module.exports = withPlugins(
[withTM],
withExpo({
projectRoot: __dirname,
})
);
3. (Optional) add InitializeColorMode
to pages/_document.js
If you're using a color mode (such as dark mode) in your app, you'll probably want to add InitializeColorMode
to avoid a flash of unstyled text.
Just import InitializeColorMode
, and put it in at the top of your body
tag in pages/_document.js
.
Your pages/_document.js
should look something like this.
That's it! Btw, if you're using Expo + Next.js, check out my library, expo-next-react-navigation.
👀 What does Dripsy look like?
Create a theme!
export default {
colors: {
text: '#000',
background: '#fff',
primary: 'tomato',
},
spacing: [10, 12, 14],
fontSize: [16, 20, 24],
text: {
h1: {
fontSize: 3,
},
p: {
fontSize: 1,
},
},
};
...and build a beautiful, responsive UI
<Text
sx={{
color: 'primary',
padding: [1, 3],
}}
>
Themed color!
</Text>
Todo: make the theme values show up in TS types for intelliesense.
Usage
Dripsy is an almost-drop-in replacement for React Native's UI components.
Change your imports from react-native
to dripsy
- import { View, Text } from 'react-native'
+ import { View, H1, P } from 'dripsy'
Use the sx
prop instead of style
to use themed and responsive styles:
<View
sx={{
height: [100, 400],
backgroundColor: 'primary',
marginX: 10,
}}
/>
Also, instead of marginHorizontal
, use marginX
or mx
, as seen on the theme-ui
docs.
Animated Values
To use an animated view, simple use the as
prop.
import { View } from 'dripsy';
import Animated from 'react-native-reanimated';
import { useValue } from 'react-native-redash';
function App() {
const height = useValue(0);
return <View as={Animated.View} sx={{ height }} />;
}
🏆 Before & After
Before Dripsy ☹️
This is what it took to make one responsive style without Dripsy...
import { useState } from 'react';
import { View } from 'react-native';
const ResponsiveBox = () => {
const [screenWidth, setScreenWidth] = useState(
Dimensions.get('window').width
);
useEffect(() => {
const onResize = (event) => {
setScreenWidth(event.window.width);
};
Dimensions.addEventListener('change', onResize);
return () => Dimensions.removeEventListener('change', onResize);
}, []);
let width = '100%';
if (screenWidth > 700) {
width = '50%';
}
return <View style={{ width }} />;
};
A big issue with using JS-only breakpoints like that is that it won't work on SSR apps using Expo + Next.js. The "solution" would be to lazy load the component, but then you lose the SEO benefits of Next.js. With Dripsy, SSR works fine!
With Dripsy 🤩
import { View } from 'dripsy';
const ResponsiveBox = () => {
return <View sx={{ width: ['100%', '50%'] }} />;
};
Expo + Next.js
If you're using the Expo + Next.js integration, you'll have to follow the steps to use styled components with Next.js + Expo.
API
createThemedComponent
Currently, a bunch of the React Native components are supported. That said, I haven't added them all. If you want to add one, go to src/components
and add one and submit a PR.
Or, you can use the createThemedComponent
function in your own app.
import { createThemedComponent } from 'dripsy';
import { View } from 'react-native';
const CustomView = createThemedComponent(View, {
defaultStyle: {
flex: 1,
},
});
How it works
First, this library is super inspired by theme-ui
, and uses many of its low-level functions and methodologies.
Practically speaking, this library uses the Dimensions
api on Android & iOS, and uses actual CSS breakpoints on web. The CSS breakpoints are made possible by styled-components
. This means that you get actually-native web breakpoints. That matters, because server-size rendered apps will have startup issues if you use JS-based media queries that require React to rehydrate on when it opens.
On Native, there is nothing too fancy going on. We track the screen width, generate styles based on the current width using a mobile-first approach, and return the regular React Native components. But it just feels like magic!
Contributing
This is a really new project. I'd love your help and contributions.
Under the hood, this library uses styled-components/native
.
TODO
- Add theme variants for certain element types
- Add typing for theme values
- Maybe add support for custom theme values to be typed too, with a CLI that edits the NPM package? 🧐
- It could have a
postinstall
script in package.json.
- Add SSR support (for the Expo + Next.js integration.) Currently, the responsive style doesn't rehydrate on the client when the page loads.
License
MIT