Scaffolding a React Component Library with Storybook (Using TypeScript)
When a company develops and releases a new product onto its platform, users expect this product to deliver an experience similar to another product (on the platform) they have worked with. For example, many people, including yourself, are probably familiar with at least one of Google's collaborative office tools, such as Google Sheets and/or Google Docs , that integrate seamlessly with Google Drive . Now, suppose Google announces a new collaborative office tool at Google I/O. If you decide to use this tool, then you may notice how much faster it takes for you to learn this tool, along with its shortcuts and tricks, because the interface contains features that you have previously interacted with in other tools. Across each tool, the appearance of these features, such as the editing toolbar and sharing dialog, remains consistent since they draw upon the same set of foundational elements, controls, colors, typography, animations, etc. By building a component library, we can centralize all reusable components at one location and access these components from any of our products. Furthermore, pairing a component library with a design system unifies every product within the platform under a singular brand identity. For distributed teams that work on products independently of one another, this allows teams to follow the same design principles/philosophies/patterns, share code and create components in isolation. Writing components in an environment outside of our application makes them flexible and adaptable to any specific layout requirements. This way, the component's design can account for both known and unforeseen use cases. Anytime designers, developers and product managers contribute to the library and update the components, those changes immediately propagate down to the products using those components. With so many different stakeholders involved, we need to build durable components that are thoroughly tested and well-documented. A popular open-source tool for organizing and building components in isolation is Storybook , which comes with a sandbox for previewing/demoing components and mocking use cases to capture different states of a component in stories . Documenting these use cases as stories especially helps in onboarding new team members. Storybook has integrations with different front-end libraries/frameworks: React , Vue , Angular , Svelte , etc. Additionally, if you need functionality that Storybook doesn't already provide, then you can create addons to extend Storybook.
