Intro to Addons

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By default, Storybook comes with a way to list stories and visualize them. Addons implement extra features for Storybooks to make them more useful.

Basically, there are two types of addons. (Decorators and Native Addons)

1. Decorators

Decorators are wrapper components or Storybook decorators that wrap a story.

Wrapper Components

For example, let’s say we want to center a story rendered on the screen. For that, we can use a wrapper component like this:

const styles = {
textAlign: 'center',
};
const Center = ({ children }) => <div style={styles}>{children}</div>;

Then we can use it when writing stories.

import Center from './center';
import Button from './button';

export default {
  title: 'Button',
};

export const defaultView = () => (
  <Center>
    <Button>Hello Button</Button>
  </Center>
);

Storybook Decorators

You can also expose this functionality as a Storybook decorator and use it like this:

import Button from './button';
import Center from './center';

export default {
  title: 'Button',
  decorators: [storyFn => <Center>{storyFn()}</Center>],
};

export const defaultView = () => (
  <Button>Hello Button</Button>
);

You can also add a decorator globally for all stories like this:

in .storybook/preview.js:

import { addDecorator } from '@storybook/react';
import Center from './center';

addDecorator(storyFn => <Center>{storyFn()}</Center>);

2. Native Addons

Native addons use Storybook as a platform and interact with it. Native addons can add extra features beyond wrapping stories.

For example, storybook-actions is such an addon.

Demo of Storybook Addon Actions

It will allow you to inspect the parameters of any event of your components.

See the following links to learn more about native addons: