Unlock the Power of Styled Components

Discover the Magic Behind Styled Components

Styled components have revolutionized the way we create inline-styled React components. But have you ever wondered how they work under the hood? In this tutorial, we’ll delve into the world of styled components and explore how to build your own.

What Are Styled Components?

Styled components eliminate the mapping between components and styles, allowing you to define your styles directly on your React components. You can create a quick inline-styled component like this:

const Button = styled.button`
  background-color: blue;
`;

This creates a Button component with a background color set to blue. The styling code in the backticks is applied to the HTML button element.

The Power of Tagged Template Literals

Styled components use JavaScript’s tagged template literals feature to style components. Tagged template literals give you more control over the parsing of your literals, allowing you to parse template literals with a function. The syntax is as follows:

tag`string ${value}`;

The tagged function receives the string and values as arguments, allowing you to manipulate the template literal.

How Styled Components Work

We import the styled object from the styled-components library and use its HTML tags to create inline-styled components. The styled object contains HTML tags as properties, each with a function as its value. This function is the tagged function that receives the CSS styling code and values.

Building Your Own Styled Components

Now that we understand how styled components work, let’s build our own styled-components library. We’ll create a Node.js project and import the Component from React. We’ll then create a styled object and an array to hold HTML tag names.

import React, { Component } from 'eact';

const styled = {};
const htmlTags = ['div', 'button', 'pan', /*... */];

htmlTags.forEach((tag) => {
  styled[tag] = (strings,...values) => {
    // Implementation of the tagged function
  };
});

Adding Theming Capabilities

To add theming capabilities to our styled components, we’ll create a ThemeProvider component that accepts a theme object as a prop. We’ll then use the useContext hook to consume the theme context in our styled components.

const ThemeContext = React.createContext();

const ThemeProvider = ({ theme, children }) => {
  return (
    
      {children}
    
  );
};

const useTheme = () => {
  return React.useContext(ThemeContext);
};

Putting it All Together

With our styled components library complete, we can now create themed components with ease. We’ll create a Div and Button component and theme them using our ThemeProvider component.

const Div = styled.div`
  background-color: ${props => props.theme.backgroundColor};
`;

const Button = styled.button`
  background-color: ${props => props.theme.buttonColor};
`;

const App = () => {
  return (

      Click me!
    
  );
};

Approach Styled Components with Confidence

Now that you understand the inner workings of styled components, you can approach using them with confidence. You can even create your own styled components library! With a deeper understanding of how styled components work, you’ll be able to tackle even the most complex styling tasks with ease.