/glamorous

React component styling solved 💄

Primary LanguageJavaScriptMIT LicenseMIT

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glamorous

React component styling solved with an elegant (inspired) API, small footprint (<5kb gzipped), and great performance (via glamor).

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The problem

You like CSS in JS, but you don't like having to create entire component functions just for styling purposes. You don't want to give a name to something that's purely style-related. And it's just kind of annoying to do the style-creating, className assigning, and props-forwarding song and dance.

For example, this is what you have to do with raw glamor (or aphrodite or similar for that matter):

const styles = glamor.css({
  fontSize: 20,
  textAlign: 'center',
})
function MyStyledDiv({className = '', ...rest}) {
  return (
    <div
      className={`${styles} ${className}`}
      {...rest}
    />
  )
}

This solution

With glamorous, that example above looks as simple as this:

const MyStyledDiv = glamorous.div({
  fontSize: 20,
  textAlign: 'center',
})

In fact, it's even better, because there are a bunch of features that make composing these components together really nice!

Oh, and what if you didn't care to give MyStyledDiv a name? If you just want a div that's styled using glamor? You can do that too:

const { Div } = glamorous

function App() {
  return (
    <Div
      fontSize={20}
      textAlign="center"
    >
      Hello world!
    </Div>
  )
}

So that's the basics of this solution... Let's get to the details!

Installation

This module is distributed via npm which is bundled with node and should be installed as one of your project's dependencies:

npm install --save glamorous

This also depends on react and glamor so you'll need those in your project as well (if you don't already have them):

npm install --save react glamor

You can then use one of the module formats:

  • main: dist/glamorous.cjs.js - exports itself as a CommonJS module
  • global: dist/glamorous.umd.js and dist/glamorous.umd.min.js - exports itself as a umd module which is consumable in several environments, the most notable as a global.
  • jsnext:main and module: dist/glamorous.es.js - exports itself using the ES modules specification, you'll need to configure webpack to make use of this file do this using the resolve.mainFields property.

The most common use-case is consuming this module via CommonJS:

const glamorous = require('glamorous')
// etc.

If you're transpiling (and/or using the jsnext:main):

import glamorous from 'glamorous'

If you want to use the global:

<!-- Load dependencies -->
<script src="https://unpkg.com/react/dist/react.js"></script>
<script src="https://unpkg.com/glamor/umd/index.js"></script>
<!-- load library -->
<script src="https://unpkg.com/glamorous/dist/glamorous.umd.js"></script>
<script>
// Use window.glamorous here...
</script>

Terms and concepts

glamorous

The glamorous function is the main (only) export. It allows you to create glamorous components that render the styles to the component you give it. This is done by forwarding a className prop to the component you tell it to render. But before we get into how you wrap custom components, let's talk about the built-in DOM components.

built-in DOM component factories

For every DOM element, there is an associated glamorous component factory attached to the glamorous function. As above, you can access these factories like so: glamorous.div, glamorous.a, glamorous.article, etc.

glamorousComponentFactory

Whether you create one yourself or use one of the built-in ones mentioned above, each glamorousComponentFactory allows you to invoke it with styles and it returns you a new component which will have those styles applied when it's rendered. This is accomplished by generating a className for the styles you give and forwarding that className onto the rendered element. So if you're wrapping a component you intend to style, you'll need to make sure you accept the className as a prop and apply it to where you want the styles applied in your custom component (normally the root element).

...styles

The glamorousComponentFactory accepts any number of style object arguments. These can be style objects or functions which are invoked with props on every render and return style objects. To learn more about what these style objects can look like, please take a look at the glamor documentation.

GlamorousComponent

The GlamorousComponent is what is returned from the glamorousComponentFactory. Its job is to get all the styles together get a className (from glamor) and forward that on to your component.

For examples below, we'll use this as our GlamorousComponent:

const MyStyledDiv = glamorous.div({margin: 1, fontSize: 1, padding: 1})

It does a few interesting things based on the props you pass it:

className

For each className you provide, the GlamorousComponent will check to see whether it is a glamor generated className (can be from raw glamor or from glamorous, doesn't matter). If it is, it will get the original styles that were used to generate that className and merge those with the styles for the element that's rendered in a way that the provided className's styles win in the event of a conflict.

If the className is not generated by glamor, then it will simply be forwarded along with the GlamorousComponent-generated className.

const myCustomGlamorStyles = glamor.css({fontSize: 2})
<MyStyledDiv className={`${myCustomGlamorStyles} custom-class`} />
// styles applied:
// {margin: 1, fontSize: 2, padding: 1}
// as well as any styles custom-class applies
cssOverrides

This is an object and if provided, it will be merged with this component's and take highest priority over the component's predefined styles.

const myCustomGlamorStyles = glamor.css({fontSize: 2, padding: 2})
<MyStyledDiv
  className={`${myCustomGlamorStyles} custom-class`}
  cssOverrides={{padding: 3}}
/>
// styles applied:
// {margin: 1, fontSize: 2, padding: 3}
// as well as any styles custom-class applies
other props

Only props that are safe to forward to the specific element that will ultimately be rendered will be forwarded. So this is totally legit:

<MyStyledDiv size="big" />

A use case for doing something like this would be for dynamic styles:

const staticStyles = {color: 'green'}
const dynamicStyles = props => {fontSize: props.size === 'big' ? 32 : 24}
const MyDynamicallyStyledDiv = glamorous.div(staticStyles, dynamicStyles)

The exception to this prop forwarding is the pre-created GlamorousComponents (see below).

built-in GlamorousComponents

Often you want to style something without actually giving it a name (because naming things is hard). So glamorous also exposes a pre-created GlamorousComponent for each DOM node type which make this reasonable to do:

const { Div, Span, A, Img } = glamorous

function MyUserInterface({name, tagline, imageUrl, homepage, size}) {
  const nameSize = size
  const taglineSize = size * 0.5
  return (
    <Div display="flex" flexDirection="column" justifyContent="center">
      <A href={homepage} textDecoration="underline" color="#336479">
        <Img borderRadius="50%" height={180} src={imageUrl} />
        <Div fontSize={nameSize} fontWeight="bold">{name}</Div>
      </A>
      <Span fontSize={taglineSize} color="#767676">
        {tagline}
      </Span>
    </Div>
  )
}

Having to name all of that stuff could be tedious, so having these pre-built components is handy. The other handy bit here is that the props are the styles for these components. Notice that glamorous can distinguish between props that are for styling and those that are have semantic meaning (like with the Img and A components which make use of src and href props).

One other tip... This totally works:

<glamorous.Div color="blue">
  JSX is pretty wild!
</glamorous.Div>

Server Side Rendering (SSR)

Because both glamor and react support SSR, glamorous does too! I actually do this on my personal site which is generated at build-time on the server. Learn about rendering react on the server and glamor too.

Inspiration

This package was inspired by the work from people's work on the following projects:

The biggest inspiration for building this is because I love the API offered by styled-components, but I wanted:

  1. Not to ship a CSS parser to the browser (because it's huge and less performant).
  2. Support for RTL (via something like rtl-css-js)
  3. Support for using real JavaScript objects rather than a CSS string (better tooling support, ESLint, etc.)

You can get around the parser issue if you use a certain babel plugin, but then you can't do any dynamic construction of your CSS string (like this) which is a bummer for custom utilities.

Other Solutions

There are actually quite a few solutions to the general problem of styling in React. This isn't the place for a full-on comparison of features, but I'm unaware of any which supports all of the features which this library supports.

Support

If you need help, please fork this codepen and bring it up in the chat

Contributors

Thanks goes to these people (emoji key):


Kent C. Dodds
💻 📖 🚇 ⚠️
Ives van Hoorne
💡
Gerardo Nardelli
📖
Chandan Rai
📖

This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!

LICENSE

MIT