Integrate Material UI and Storybook

How to setup Material UI and Storybook

Material UI offers a set of themeable components that devs can use to start building UIs right away. It’s based on Material Design language from Google.

Storybook is a frontend workbench for building UIs in isolation. By combining Storybook and Material UI, you can build UIs faster without all the grunt work. This recipe shows you how to configure Storybook to load Material UI components and dynamically interact with their API.

📦 Bundle your fonts for fast and consistent rendering 🎨 Load your custom theme and add a theme switcher ♻️ Reuse Material UI types to auto-generate story controls

Bundle fonts and icons for better perf

Material UI depends on two fonts to render as intended, Google’s Roboto and Material Icons. While you can load these fonts directly from the Google Fonts CDN, bundling fonts with Storybook is better for performance.

• 🏎️ Fonts load faster because they are coming from the same place as your app
• ✈️ Font will load offline so you can continue developing your stories anywhere
• 📸 No more inconsistent snapshot tests because fonts load instantly

To get started, install the fonts as dependencies.

Then import the CSS files into .storybook/preview.js, the entrypoint of your storybook.

Load custom themes and add a theme switcher

Material UI comes with a default theme out of the box, but you can also create and provide your own themes. Given the popularity of dark mode, you'll likely end with more than one custom theme. Let's look at how you can load custom themes and switch between them with just a click.

For example, take these custom light and dark mode themes.

First of all, install our @storybook/addon-styling addon.

Then register it with Storybook in .storybook/main.js

And finally apply the custom themes to our stories. We’ll need to wrap them in Material UI’s ThemeProvider using the withThemeFromJSXProvider decorator.

Awesome! Now when Storybook is reloaded, you'll see that our withThemeFromJSXProvider decorator is providing our custom light theme by default.

Use Material UI prop types for better controls and docs

Storybook controls give you graphical controls to manipulate a component’s props. They’re handy for finding edge cases of a component and prototyping in the browser.

Usually, you have to manually configure controls. But if you’re using Typescript, you can reuse Material UI’s component prop types to auto generate story controls. As a bonus, this will also automatically populate the prop table in your documentation tab.

Let’s take the following Button component for example.

Here I’m using the label prop as the MuiButton’s child and passing all other props through. However, when we render this into Storybook, our controls panel only lets us change the label prop that we declared ourselves.

This is because Storybook only adds props to the controls table that are explicitly declared in the component’s prop types or in the Story Args. Let’s update Storybook’s Docgen configuration to bring Material UI‘s Button props into the controls table as well.

We also want to update the parameters in .storybook/preview.js to show the description and default columns for the controls table.

Lastly, update the ButtonProps type to extend from Material UI’s Button props to add all of these props to the controls.

Restart your Storybook server so that these config changes take effect. You should now see that Button has controls for all of MuiButton's props as well.

Choose which controls are visible

Our button now has 27 props, which is perhaps a little much for your use case. To control which props are visible we can use TypeScript’s Pick<type, keys> and Omit<type, keys> utilities.

And now our Button will only take the variant, size, and color props from MuiButton.

📣 Shout out to Eric Mudrak’s awesome Storybook with React & TypeScript article that inspired this tip.