Best way to style components in React | 2021

Styled Components are one of the new ways to use CSS in modern JavaScript. It is the meant to be a successor of CSS Modules, a way to write CSS that’s scoped to a single component, and not leak to any other element in the page. Utilising tagged template literals and the power of CSS, styled-components allows you to write actual CSS code to style your components. It also removes the mapping between components and styles – using components as a low-level styling construct could not be easier!

It’s not only that but Styled Components also provide

• Automatic critical CSS: styled-components keeps track of which components are rendered on a page and injects their styles and nothing else, fully automatically. Combined with code splitting, this means your users load the least amount of code necessary.
• No class name bugs: styled-components generates unique class names for your styles. You never have to worry about duplication, overlap or misspellings.
• Easier deletion of CSS: it can be hard to know whether a class name is used somewhere in your codebase. styled-components makes it obvious, as every bit of styling is tied to a specific component. If the component is unused (which tooling can detect) and gets deleted, all its styles get deleted with it.
• Simple dynamic styling: adapting the styling of a component based on its props or a global theme is simple and intuitive without having to manually manage dozens of classes.
• Painless maintenance: you never have to hunt across different files to find the styling affecting your component, so maintenance is a piece of cake no matter how big your codebase is.
• Automatic vendor prefixing: write your CSS to the current standard and let styled-components handle the rest.

Installation

Installation is quite simple, just run the following command if you are using npm:

npm install --save styled-components

A Simple Styled Components Example

The following example creates two simple components, a wrapper and a title, with some styles attached to it:

// Create a Title component that'll render an <h1> tag with some styles
const Title = styled.h1`
  font-size: 1.5em;
  text-align: center;
  color: palevioletred;
`;

// Create a Wrapper component that'll render a <section> tag with some styles
const Wrapper = styled.section`
  padding: 4em;
  background: papayawhip;
`;

// Use Title and Wrapper like any other React component – except they're styled!
render(
  <Wrapper>
    <Title>
      Hello World!
    </Title>
  </Wrapper>
);

How to pass props in styled components?

const Button = styled.button`
  /* Adapt the colors based on primary prop */
  background: ${props => props.primary ? "palevioletred" : "white"};
  color: ${props => props.primary ? "white" : "palevioletred"};

  font-size: 1em;
  margin: 1em;
  padding: 0.25em 1em;
  border: 2px solid palevioletred;
  border-radius: 3px;
`;

render(
  <div>
    <Button>Normal</Button>
    <Button primary>Primary</Button>
  </div>
);

How to extend styles in styled components?

// The Button from the last section without the interpolations
const Button = styled.button`
  color: palevioletred;
  font-size: 1em;
  margin: 1em;
  padding: 0.25em 1em;
  border: 2px solid palevioletred;
  border-radius: 3px;
`;

// A new component based on Button, but with some override styles
const TomatoButton = styled(Button)`
  color: tomato;
  border-color: tomato;
`;

render(
  <div>
    <Button>Normal Button</Button>
    <TomatoButton>Tomato Button</TomatoButton>
  </div>
);

Conclusion

That’s it for this Styled Components introduction! These concepts will help you get an understanding of the concept and help you get up and running with this way of using CSS in JavaScript.

To learn more please visit StyledComponents documentation