Integrating Storybook with Next.js’s Design System
Sometimes when you are learning and trying to get better in specific subject and suddenly you get to know about something, that makes your job even more easy and you start loving that thing and always think why haven’t you knew about it before, same thing happened with me a month ago when I found out about Storybook. It gave me ability to code components better and alegant.
What is Storybook?
Storybook is a powerful tool that enables developers to build UI components in isolation and test them interactively. It provides a dedicated environment for developing, documenting, and testing UI components, making the development process more efficient and collaborative.
Key Features of Storybook:
- Component Isolation: Storybook allows you to create individual stories for each UI component, making it easier to focus on and develop components in isolation. This promotes modularity and reusability.
- Interactive Testing: You can interact with your components directly within Storybook’s interface, testing various states, props, and configurations. This helps ensure that your components behave as expected under different conditions.
- Documentation: Storybook automatically generates documentation for your components, including their props, descriptions, and examples. This makes it easy for other developers to understand and use your components effectively.
- Theming: Storybook supports theming, allowing you to create different visual styles for your components and test them in various contexts. This helps ensure consistency and maintainability across your application.
- State Management: You can manage component state within Storybook, simulating different user interactions and testing how your components respond. This is particularly useful for complex components with dynamic behavior.
- Accessibility Testing: Storybook can be integrated with accessibility testing tools to help you identify and address accessibility issues in your components. This ensures that your UI is inclusive and usable by people with disabilities.
- Integration with Build Tools: Storybook integrates seamlessly with popular build tools like Webpack and Rollup, making it easy to incorporate into your development workflow.
Let see how to integrate Storybook with Nextjs
Before starting you can go to this link and see the offical documentation of Storybook and see how you can install with other frameworks.
First we need to create Nextjs project, create Next app with the following command
npx create-next-app@latest <project-name>
cd <project-name>After going inside the root directory and install Storybook, run the following command:
npx storybook@latest initAfter initiating the Storybook in Nextjs you can see that two folders are created ‘.storybook’ and ‘stories’.
.storybook has two files ‘main.ts’ and ‘preview.ts’; ‘main.ts’, this file serves as the entry point for your Storybook configuration. It’s where you define the core settings and customizations for your Storybook instance; ‘preview.ts’; this file is used to define global decorators, parameters, and other settings that apply to all stories in your Storybook instance.
‘stories’ folder is where you can organise and define stories or components.
Now, if you see in package.json file a new command is added storybook.
Run the storybook with the command ‘npm run storybook’ and your Storybook UI will be opened on port 6006 and the url will be http://localhost:6006
Lets add Nextjs Home page to Storybook, create a file inside stories folder and name it Home.stories.tsx, and paste the code from below.
import Home from "@/app/page";
export default {
title: "Pages/Home",
component: Home,
}
export const HomePage = () => <Home />And Now you can see in Storybook UI a new navigation button will appear named Home and you can see your Nextjs Home page.
Now you can create other components in this and enjoy your coding.
Below is the github repo where you can find my Storybook, I will keep updating components in future in the same repo.
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