Step 1: Setting up React Native with Storybook

This is the first post in a series of setting up a react native UI library development foundation. Please refer to the link collections here Series: The Ultimate React Native UI Library starter repo for the full series overview.

In the first step of setting up the ultimate UI library boilerplate we go through making a new init, and installing Storybook.

If you've done this sort of thing before you'll probably want to jump to the bottom where I install a package which will load stories dynamically

Oh right, I'm not using expo... ;)

The other parts

React Native Init

If you are completely new to react native please follow the steps on the official react native docs to get your environment setup.

Init

npx react-native init RNStorybook

This will set up a fresh new react native project for you.

Make sure that the installation was successful by running both the android and iOS builds of the project before going ahead. I always take things step by step, so when things bug out then I know exactly where it worked and where it broke.

so for the people who forgot etc. here's the commands for doing so.

cd ios && pod install

cd .. 

yarn run ios

or

yarn run android

Behold the welcome screen!

Android	iOS

Installing Storybook

Using the automated setup as recommended by the docs here: Storybook quick-start guide

inside the root folder run the following command to initiate the installation:

npx -p @storybook/cli sb init

When prompted if you want to install the react-native server accept.

After that open up your code editor and we will do the final steps in rendering storybook out on the screen.

inside the folder ./storybook open up index.js and we will add in our app name. You can either add it manually or you can be lazy as me and import the app name from app.json in the root folder. It has the benefit that if the app name changes you won't need to go in and change it manually.

Below is the result:

./storybook/index.js

import {AppRegistry} from 'react-native';
import {getStorybookUI, configure} from '@storybook/react-native';
import {name as appName} from '../app.json';

import './rn-addons';

// import stories
configure(() => {
  require('./stories');
}, module);

// Refer to https://github.com/storybookjs/storybook/tree/master/app/react-native#start-command-parameters
// To find allowed options for getStorybookUI
const StorybookUIRoot = getStorybookUI({});

// If you are using React Native vanilla and after installation you don't see your app name here, write it manually.
// If you use Expo you can safely remove this line.
AppRegistry.registerComponent(appName, () => StorybookUIRoot);

export default StorybookUIRoot;

after we have added our app name to Storybook, inside of the root folder, we open index.js. This is the default entry point for our React Native app.

Inside of ./index.js comment everything out and add the following line:

export { default } from './storybook'

This will render storybook as the first entry to your app, but later if you want Storybook to be rendered inside of a tab-view or another type of screen you'll just add storybook as any other component. More on that in the Storybook docs.

Now when you run the following command we can start up our React Native development server on port 7007:

yarn run storybook

It will give you the following screen:

Hold your horses you might say "That menu-bar never stops loading!" and you'll be right. This web interface is trying to connect to a iOS or Android emulator.

so run an emulator and if you put the browser window and the device side by side it should look like:

If you play around with this you notice that you can control the view which is being shown in the emulator / simulator from the browser. Neat right! ⭐️ It's a nice feature which makes navigating your component library on a device very fast and easy.

Setting up dynamic story-loading

As your project grows you don't want to add stories into storybook manually as is the default. It's tedious and you'll spent time "debugging" why your component does not show up.

In comes react-native-storybook-loader

I really like this project because after setting it up I don't have to worry about adding any new stories every again.

Setup

Install

yarn add -dev react-native-storybook-loader 

Add script to package.json

{
  "scripts": {
    ......
    "prestorybook": "rnstl"
    ......
  }
}

Add into Storybook configuration

Open up ./storybook/index.js and modify the entry where the stories are loaded from:

./storybook/index.js

import { AppRegistry } from 'react-native'
import { getStorybookUI, configure } from '@storybook/react-native'
import { name as appName } from '../app.json'

import { loadStories } from './storyLoader'

import './rn-addons'

// Add React native storybook loader here!
configure(() => {
  loadStories() // <------------------
}, module)

// Refer to https://github.com/storybookjs/storybook/tree/master/app/react-native#start-command-parameters
// To find allowed options for getStorybookUI
const StorybookUIRoot = getStorybookUI({})

// If you are using React Native vanilla and after installation you don't see your app name here, write it manually.
// If you use Expo you can safely remove this line.
AppRegistry.registerComponent(appName, () => StorybookUIRoot)

export default StorybookUIRoot

Configure story loader

The last step in setting up react-native-storybook-loader is configuring in which directory it should look for stories.

Open up package.json again and add a config field:

"config": {
    "react-native-storybook-loader": {
      "searchDir": ["./src/components"],
      "pattern": "**/*.stories.js",
      "outputFile": "./storybook/storyLoader.js"
    }
  }

I wan't it to look inside of the ./src/components directory but you can set it up to look in a different folder, or even add more places it should look in by adding them into the searchDir array. If you change the other fields you'll need to change your other config to match accordingly.

Adding Test component

To test that this part of the setup works lets add a test component and check so everything works.

I'm making a new directory called src and inside of the directory I'm adding a folder called components -> ./src/components

and in these files I'm adding two new files called TestComponent.js & TestComponent.stories.js and let's code a test component and add a story for storybook.

./src/components/TestComponent.js

import React from 'react';
import {View, Text} from 'react-native';

function TestComponent() {
  return (
    <View>
      <Text>Hello from React Native</Text>
    </View>
  );
}

export default TestComponent;

and a story for storybook

./src/components/TestComponent.stories.js

import React from 'react';
import {storiesOf} from '@storybook/react-native';

import TestComponent from './TestComponent';

storiesOf('Test Component', module).add('example', () => <TestComponent />);

Note that while using react native we have to use the storiesOf api from Storybook.

Running everything together

Let's test it out on your device of choice!

yarn run iOS

This will first run the react-native-storybook-loader script. It will output a reference to all the files matching the pattern *.stories.js inside ./src/components to ./storybook/storyloader.js and load them into Storybook. After that it's running storybook as normal.

Here's what you should see:

Hopefully you'll see the test component on the screen.

Success!

What did we accomplish:

• initiated a new react native project.
• installed @storybook/react-native.
• installed @storybook/react-native-server.
• installed & configured react-native-storybook-loader.
• Added our first test component and story.

If you like this content please bookmark the init post of this series here and stay tuned for part 2!

You can find the finished repository for the whole series on Github: react-native-storybook-boilerplate

Consider giving it a star or raising an issue, PRs are most welcome!