alexxnica / radium

A toolchain for React component styling.

Radium

npm install radium

Radium is a set of tools to manage inline styles on React elements. It gives you powerful styling capabilities without CSS.

Inspired by React: CSS in JS by vjeux.

Overview

Eliminating CSS in favor of inline styles that are computed on the fly is a powerful approach, providing a number of benefits over traditional CSS:

• Scoped styles without selectors
• Avoids specificity conflicts
• Source order independence
• Dead code elimination
• Highly expressive

Despite that, there are some common CSS features and techniques that inline styles don't easily accommodate: media queries, browser states (:hover, :focus, :active) and modifiers (no more .btn-primary!). Radium offers a standard interface and abstractions for dealing with these problems.

When we say expressive, we mean it: math, concatenation, regex, conditionals, functions–JavaScript is at your disposal. Modern web applications demand that the display changes when data changes, and Radium is here to help.

For a short technical explanation, see How does Radium work?.

Convinced about CSS in JS with React, but not Radium? Check out our comprehensive comparison of 14+ alternatives.

Features

• Conceptually simple extension of normal inline styles
• Browser state styles to support :hover, :focus, and :active
• Media queries
• Automatic vendor prefixing
• Keyframes animation helper
• ES6 class and createClass support

Docs

• Overview
• API Docs
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Usage

Start by adding the @Radium decorator to your component class. Alternatively, wrap Radium() around your component, like module.exports = Radium(Component), or Component = Radium(Component), which works with classes, createClass, and stateless components (functions that take props and return a ReactElement). Then, write a style object as you normally would with inline styles, and add in styles for interactive states and media queries. Pass the style object to your component via style={...} and let Radium do the rest!

<Button kind="primary">Radium Button</Button>

var Radium = require('radium');
var React = require('react');
var color = require('color');

@Radium
class Button extends React.Component {
  static propTypes = {
    kind: PropTypes.oneOf(['primary', 'warning']).isRequired
  };

  render() {
    // Radium extends the style attribute to accept an array. It will merge
    // the styles in order. We use this feature here to apply the primary
    // or warning styles depending on the value of the `kind` prop. Since its
    // all just JavaScript, you can use whatever logic you want to decide which
    // styles are applied (props, state, context, etc).
    return (
      <button
        style={[
          styles.base,
          styles[this.props.kind]
        ]}>
        {this.props.children}
      </button>
    );
  }
}

// You can create your style objects dynamically or share them for
// every instance of the component.
var styles = {
  base: {
    color: '#fff',

    // Adding interactive state couldn't be easier! Add a special key to your
    // style object (:hover, :focus, :active, or @media) with the additional rules.
    ':hover': {
      background: color('#0074d9').lighten(0.2).hexString()
    }
  },

  primary: {
    background: '#0074D9'
  },

  warning: {
    background: '#FF4136'
  }
};

Examples

To see the universal examples:

npm install
npm run universal

To see local client-side only examples in action, do this:

npm install
npm run examples

How does Radium work?

Following is a short technical explanation of Radium's inner workings:

• Wrap the render function
• Recurse into the result of the original render
• For each element:
  • Add handlers to props if interactive styles are specified, e.g. onMouseEnter for :hover, wrapping existing handlers if necessary
  • If any of the handlers are triggered, e.g. by hovering, Radium calls setState to update a Radium-specific field on the components state object
  • On re-render, resolve any interactive styles that apply, e.g. :hover, by looking up the element's key or ref in the Radium-specific state

More with Radium

You can find a list of other tools, components, and frameworks to help you build with Radium on our wiki. Contributions welcome!

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING