Toolbars & globals
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Storybook ships with toolbar addons to control the viewport and background the story renders in. You can also create toolbar items which control special “globals”. You can then read the global values to create decorators to control story rendering.
Globals
Globals in Storybook represent “global” (as in not story-specific) inputs to the rendering of the story. As they aren’t specific to the story, they aren’t passed in the args
argument to the story function (although they are accessible as context.globals
). Instead, they are typically used in decorators, which apply to all stories.
When the globals change, the story re-renders and the decorators rerun with the new values. The easiest way to change globals is to create a toolbar item for them.
Global types and the toolbar annotation
Storybook has a simple, declarative syntax for configuring toolbar menus. In your .storybook/preview.js|ts
, you can add your own toolbars by creating globalTypes
with a toolbar
annotation:
As globals are global you can only set globalTypes
and initialGlobals
in .storybook/preview.js|ts
.
When you start your Storybook, your toolbar should have a new dropdown menu with the light
and dark
options.
Create a decorator
We have a global
implemented. Let's wire it up! We can consume our new theme
global in a decorator using the context.globals.theme
value.
For example, suppose you are using styled-components
. You can add a theme provider decorator to your .storybook/preview.js|ts
config:
Setting globals on a story
The ability to set globals on a story or component is available in Storybook 8.3+. Some addons, like backgrounds and viewport, have been updated to use the globals
API when a feature flag is enabled.
When a global value is changed with a toolbar menu in Storybook, that value continues to be used as you navigate between stories. But sometimes a story requires a specific value to render correctly, e.g., when testing against a particular environment.
To ensure that a story always uses a specific global value, regardless of what has been chosen in the toolbar, you can set the globals
annotation on a story or component. This overrides the global value for those stories and disables the toolbar menu for that global when viewing the stories.
In the example above, Storybook will force all Button stories to use a gray background color, except the OnDark
story, which will use the dark background. For all Button stories, the toolbar menu will be disabled for the backgrounds
global, with a tooltip explaining that the global is set at the story level.
Configuring a story's globals
annotation to override the project-level global settings is useful but should be used with moderation. Globals that are not defined at the story level can be selected interactively in Storybook's UI, allowing users to explore every existing combination of values (e.g., global values, args
). Setting them at the story level will disable that control, preventing users from exploring the available options.
Advanced usage
So far, we've created and used a global inside Storybook.
Now, let's take a look at a more complex example. Suppose we wanted to implement a new global called locale for internationalization, which shows a flag on the right side of the toolbar.
In your .storybook/preview.js|ts
, add the following:
The icon
element used in the examples loads the icons from the @storybook/components
package. See here for the list of available icons that you can use.
To use toolbars, you must install the @storybook/addon-toolbars
add-on, which is included by default in @storybook/addon-essentials
.
Adding the configuration element right
will display the text on the right side in the toolbar menu once you connect it to a decorator.
Here's a list of the available configuration options.
MenuItem | Type | Description | Required |
---|---|---|---|
value | String | The string value of the menu that gets set in the globals | Yes |
title | String | The main text of the title | Yes |
right | String | A string that gets displayed on the right side of the menu | No |
icon | String | An icon that gets shown in the toolbar if this item is selected | No |
Consuming globals from within a story
We recommend consuming globals from within a decorator and defining a global setting for all stories.
But we're aware that sometimes it's more beneficial to use toolbar options on a per-story basis.
Using the example above, you can modify any story to retrieve the Locale global
from the story context:
Consuming globals from within an addon
If you're working on a Storybook addon and need to retrieve globals, you can do so. The @storybook/manager-api
package provides a hook for this scenario. You can use the useGlobals()
hook to retrieve any globals you want.
Using the ThemeProvider example above, you could expand it to display which theme is active inside a panel as such:
Updating globals from within an addon
If you're working on a Storybook addon that needs to update the global and refresh the UI, you can do so. As mentioned previously, the @storybook/manager-api
package provides the necessary hook for this scenario. You can use the updateGlobals
function to update any global values you need.
For example, if you were working on a toolbar addon, and you want to refresh the UI and update the global once the user clicks on a button: