Automatic setup

Before trying the below commands, you should try the following command. In most cases, Storybook will detect that you’re using react or react-scripts, and install the appropriate packages.

npx -p @storybook/cli sb init

You may have tried to use our quick start guide to setup your project for Storybook. If it failed because it couldn’t detect you’re using React, you could try forcing it to use React:

npx -p @storybook/cli sb init --type react

If you’re using Create React App (or a fork of react-scripts), you should use this command instead:

npx -p @storybook/cli sb init --type react_scripts

If you’re using Gatsby, some added config is required - see Gatsby’s Storybook guide.

Note: You must have a package.json in your project or the above commands will fail.

Manual setup

If you want to set up Storybook manually for your React project, this is the guide for you.

A note for Create React App users

You can now use @storybook/preset-create-react-app to configure Storybook on your behalf. This is installed by Storybook during automatic setup (Storybook 5.3 or newer).

Step 1: Add dependencies

Add @storybook/react

Add @storybook/react to your project. To do that, run:

npm install @storybook/react --save-dev

Add react, react-dom, @babel/core, and babel-loader

Make sure that you have react, react-dom, @babel/core, and babel-loader in your dependencies as well because we list these as a peer dependencies:

npm install react react-dom --save
npm install babel-loader @babel/core --save-dev

Step 2: Add an npm script

Then add the following NPM script to your package.json in order to start the storybook later in this guide:

{
"scripts": {
  "storybook": "start-storybook"
}
}

Step 3: Create the main file

For a basic Storybook configuration, the only thing you need to do is tell Storybook where to find stories.

To do that, create a file at .storybook/main.js with the following content:

module.exports = {
stories: ['../src/**/*.stories.[tj]s'],
};

That will load all the stories underneath your ../src directory that match the pattern *.stories.js. We recommend co-locating your stories with your source files, but you can place them wherever you choose.

Step 4: Write your stories

Now create a ../src/index.stories.js file, and write your first story like this:

import React from 'react';
import { Button } from '@storybook/react/demo';

export default { title: 'Button' };

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

export const withEmoji = () => (
  <Button>
    <span role="img" aria-label="so cool">
      😀 😎 👍 💯
    </span>
  </Button>
);

Each story is a single state of your component. In the above case, there are two stories for the demo button component:

Button
├── With Text
└── With Emoji

Finally: Run your Storybook

Now everything is ready. Run your storybook with:

npm run storybook

Storybook should start, on a random open port in dev-mode.

Now you can develop your components and write stories and see the changes in Storybook immediately since it uses Webpack’s hot module reloading.