Addon knowledge base
Once you understand the basics of writing addons, there are a variety of common enhancements to make your addon better. This page details additional information about addon creation. Use it as a quick reference guide when creating your own addons.
Disable the addon panel
It’s possible to disable the addon panel for a particular story.
To make that possible, you need to pass the paramKey
element when you register the panel:
Then when adding a story, you can pass a disabled parameter.
Style your addon
Storybook uses Emotion for styling. Alongside with a theme that you can customize!
We recommend using Emotion to style your addon’s UI components. That allows you to use the active Storybook theme to deliver a seamless developer experience.
If you don’t want to use Emotion, you can use inline styles or another css-in-js lib. You can receive the theme as a prop by using Emotion's withTheme
HOC. Read more about theming.
Storybook components
Addon authors can develop their UIs using any React library. But we recommend using Storybook’s UI components in @storybook/components
to build addons faster. When you use Storybook components, you get:
- Battle-tested off-the-shelf components
- Storybook native look and feel
- Built-in support for Storybook theming
Use the components listed below with your next addon.
Complementing the components, also included is a set of UI primitives. Use the content listed below as a reference for styling your addon.
Component | Source | Story |
---|---|---|
Color Palette (see note below) | See implementation | See story |
Icon | See implementation | See story |
Typography | See implementation | See story |
The color palette implemented by @storybook/components
is a high-level abstraction of the @storybook/theming
package.
Build system
When you're developing your addon as a package, you can’t use npm link
to add it to your project. List your addon as a local dependency into your package.json:
Run either yarn
or npm install
to install the addon.
Hot module replacement
While developing your addon, you can configure HMR (hot module replacement) to reflect the changes made.
Standalone Storybook addons
If you're developing a standalone addon, add a new script to package.json
with the following:
Local Storybook addons
If you're developing a local Storybook addon built on top of an existing Storybook installation, HMR (hot module replacement) is available out of the box.
Composing addons in presets
If you're working on a preset that loads third-party addons, which you don't have control over, and you need access to certain features (e.g., decorators) or provide additional configurations. In that case, you'll need to update your preset to the following to allow you to load and configure the other addons:
If you have control over the addons you want to customize. In that case, you can update your preset and implement a custom function to load any additional presets and provide the necessary configuration, similar to how it's implemented in the Essentials addon.