FlexMasonry

FlexMasonry is a lightweight, zero-dependency, masonry (cascading grid layout) library powered by CSS flexbox. The library itself is inspired by this article by Tobias Ahlin on using flex, :nth-child(), and order to create a pure CSS masonry layout (as opposed to the hugely popular Masonry library by David DeSandro that is powered by Javascript). I've taken this concept and sprinkled in some Javascript to tie it all together and make it easy to use.

Features

Lightweight - Just 6KB of JS and CSS
Fast - Uses CSS flexbox for layout
Responsive - Show different number of columns at different breakpoints
Simple - Just 3 options

See a demo

Install

Download the latest release.
Clone this repo.
Install using NPM/Yarn:

npm install flexmasonry
yarn add flexmasonry

Then, include the flexmasonry.js and flexmasonry.css files from the dist folder in your HTML. Or you can use the files directly from a CDN:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://unpkg.com/flexmasonry/dist/flexmasonry.css">
<script src="https://unpkg.com/flexmasonry/dist/flexmasonry.js"></script>

Usage

Set up your HTML. For example:

<div class="grid">
    <div><img src="https://source.unsplash.com/t3DHojIo-08" alt=""></div>
    <div><img src="https://source.unsplash.com/Imc-IoZDMXc" alt=""></div>
    <div><img src="https://source.unsplash.com/SOZWHqeXcPQ" alt=""></div>
    <div><img src="https://source.unsplash.com/bkdzvgBB7rQ" alt=""></div>
    <div><img src="https://source.unsplash.com/Aruugw_rJCM" alt=""></div>
</div>

Then hook up the script, passing in the selector target:

FlexMasonry.init('.grid');

FlexMasonry will then convert all .grid elements to masonry grids with multiple columns.

Options

The second, optional, parameter of the init method is an object containing options. The default options are as follows:

{
    /*
     * If `responsive` is `true`, `breakpointCols` will be used to determine
     * how many columns a grid should have at a given responsive breakpoint.
     */
    responsive: true,
    /*
     * A list of how many columns should be shown at different responsive
     * breakpoints, defined by media queries.
     */
    breakpointCols: {
        'min-width: 1500px': 6,
        'min-width: 1200px': 5,
        'min-width: 992px': 4,
        'min-width: 768px': 3,
        'min-width: 576px': 2,
    },
    /*
     * If `responsive` is `false`, this number of columns will always be shown,
     * no matter the width of the screen.
     */
    numCols: 4,
}

For example, to always shown 6 columns in your grid:

FlexMasonry.init('.grid', {
    responsive: false,
    numCols: 6
});

Methods

The FlexMasonry variable has several methods:

init(targets, options = {})

Initialises the FlexMasonry library and sets up the targets as masonry grids.

targets can be a string, an array of elements or a NodeList.
options see above.

refresh(target, options = {})

Refreshes the target grid layout.

target must be an Element.
options see above.

refreshAll(options = {})

Refreshes the grid layouts of all targets passed to init().

options see above.

destroyAll()

Removes the event listeners for all targets passed to init().

Development

Run yarn to install the dependencies and use demo/index.html to test things. To watch/build the library:

yarn watch
yarn build

FAQ

Why not just use pure CSS?

A good question! You can use pure CSS to achieve the same outcome. However, there are several aspects of this setup that require a bit of "dynamic" updating to make it flexible and easy to use (hence the use of Javascript). The main one being that the masonry container requires a fixed height (which FlexMasonry calculates on the fly). Also the masonry container needs a certain number of "break" elements to work properly depending on the number of columns. To enable this, and to support having a different number of columns at different responsive breakpoints, we need Javascript.

Show your Support

To show your support for my work on this project:

Credits

FlexMasonry was created by Gilbert Pellegrom from Dev7studios. Released under the MIT license.

gilbitron/flexmasonry