Guide to creating Components

The goal of this document is to outline the process we follow internally to develop any Chakra components. At Chakra UI, we strive to make the entire codebase high-quality, readable, and easy to contribute.

At the top level, we have a 5 step process to building components:

  1. Share and discuss the component
  2. Setup the component package
  3. Write the README for the component
  4. Build the component and write tests as you go
  5. Document the component

1. Share your ideas#

We believe collaboration and communication encourages a mix of expertise, ideas and perspectives to come together to achieve the level of quality we need for Chakra UI.

There are two recommended ways to share your component ideas:

  • Visit our Discord Server and post it in the #💡-api-discussion Channel to get a conversation rolling.
  • Open a Github Discussion and share your component ideas to get community-wide feedback and inputs.

To help us to give quality feedback, we recommended that you follow this structure for any component or hook you want to contribute:

  • Quick description of the idea
  • What Problem does it solve?
  • What existing solutions have you tried?
  • Your solution and how it's better than the alternatives
  • API examples

2. Setup the component package#

Assuming your component idea was accepted by the core team, and you need to start building, here's what you need to do:

  • Run the yarn gen:pkg command to bootstrap a package and symlink with lerna.
  • Update the package.json with more relevant content. You need to update description, keywords, peerDependencies, dependencies, etc.
  • Test the build, lint, and test scripts are working correctly

Voila! You're ready to write some beautiful code!

3. Build the component or hook#

Whether you're developing a component or hook, we have a set of best practices we advice to follow to deliver on the quality expectations.

General#

  • Ensure you check the @chakra-ui/hooks and @chakra-ui/utils package to be sure we don't already have the hook you're looking to create.
  • Leverage existing code, hook, or utils as much as possible.
  • Separate component logic from UI by writing hooks, and then writing the component theme or styles

Hooks#

Add types for custom hook props and return type

export interface UseHookProps {}
export function useHook(props: UseHookProps) {
  return {}
}
export type UseHookReturn = ReturnType<typeof useHook>

TypeScript#

The end goal of this ensure all Chakra UI components are as strongly typed as possible to enable teams leverage the library.

  • Prefer named exports instead export default
  • Reduce use of Generics. Generic code can be highly reusable, but that can also come with high complexity and mental overhead.
  • Add prop types and return type for hooks
  • Add JSDoc comments for each type (used for prop table generation)

4. Build and Test#

The initial component setup include test and build scripts you can use to bundle the component for NPM.

Ensure you run these commands before creating a PR.

Testing Checklist#

  • Common use cases snapshotted
  • Common use cases run through axe/toHaveNoViolations
  • role/aria/data attributes tested
  • Component behaviors tested (reacts to events, handles callbacks appropriately, updates state correctly, etc.)
  • Controlled/uncontrolled use cases tested
  • Associated utils/helpers/etc. tested

5. Documentation#

  • Add README.md component to the package
  • Add the component to the website in the docs-sidebar and directory.

Resources#

TypeScript#

Testing#

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