Storybook is theme-able using a lightweight theming API.
Global theming
It's possible to theme Storybook globally.
Storybook includes two themes that look good out of the box: "normal" (a light theme) and "dark" (a dark theme). Unless you've set your preferred color scheme as dark, Storybook will use the light theme as default.
Make sure you have installed @storybook/addons and @storybook/theming packages.
As an example, you can tell Storybook to use the "dark" theme by modifying .storybook/manager.js:
When setting a theme, set a full theme object. The theme is replaced, not combined.
Theming docs
Storybook Docs uses the same theme system as Storybook’s UI, but is themed independently from the main UI.
Supposing you have a Storybook theme defined for the main UI in .storybook/manager.js:
Here's how you'd specify the same theme for docs in .storybook/preview.js:
Continue to read if you want to learn how to create your theme.
Create a theme quickstart
The easiest way to customize Storybook is to generate a new theme using the create() function from storybook/theming. This function includes shorthands for the most common theme variables. Here's how to use it:
First create a new file in .storybook called yourTheme.js.
Next paste the code below and tweak the variables.
Finally, import your theme into .storybook/manager.js and add it to your Storybook parameters.
The @storybook/theming package is built using TypeScript, so this should help create a valid theme for TypeScript users. The types are part of the package itself.
Many theme variables are optional, the base property is NOT. This is a perfectly valid theme:
CSS escape hatches
The Storybook theme API is narrow by design. If you want to have fine-grained control over the CSS, all of the UI and Docs components are tagged with class names to make this possible. This is advanced usage: use at your own risk.
To style these elements, insert style tags into:
- For Storybook’s UI, use
.storybook/manager-head.html - For Storybook Docs, use
.storybook/preview-head.html
Similar to changing the preview’s head tag, .storybook/manager-head.html allows you to inject code into the manager side, which can be useful to adding styles for your theme that target Storybook’s HTML.
WARNING: we don’t make any guarantees about the structure of Storybook’s HTML and it could change at any time. Consider yourself warned!
MDX component overrides
If you're using MDX for docs, there's one more level of themability. MDX allows you to completely override the components that are rendered from Markdown using a components parameter. This is an advanced usage that we don't officially support in Storybook, but it's a powerful mechanism if you need it.
Here's how you might insert a custom code renderer for code blocks on the page, in .storybook/preview.js:
You can even override a Storybook block component.
Here's how you might insert a custom <Canvas /> block:
Addons and theme creation
Some addons require specific theme variables that a Storybook user must add. If you share your theme with the community, make sure to support the official API and other popular addons so your users have a consistent experience.
For example, the popular Actions addon uses react-inspector which has themes of its own. Supply additional theme variables to style it like so:
Using the theme for addon authors
Reuse the theme variables above for a native Storybook developer experience. The theming engine relies on emotion, a CSS-in-JS library.
Use the theme variables in object notation:
Or with template literals:
