storybook/docs/addons/addon-knowledge-base.md

title
Addons knowledge base

Once you understand the basics of writing addons, there are a variety of common enhancements to make your addon better. This page details additional information about addon creation. Use it as a quick reference guide when creating your own addons.

Disabling the addon panel

It’s possible to disable the addon panel for a particular story.

To make that possible, you need to pass the paramKey element when you register the panel:

<CodeSnippets paths={[ 'common/storybook-addon-disable-addon.js.mdx', ]} />

Then when adding a story, you can pass a disabled parameter.

<CodeSnippets paths={[ 'react/button-story-disable-addon.js.mdx', ]} />

Styling your addon

Storybook uses Emotion for styling. Alongside with a theme which you can customize!

We recommend you also to use Emotion to style your addon’s UI components. That allows you to use the active Storybook theme to deliver a seamless developer experience. If you don’t want to use Emotion, you can use inline styles or another css-in-js lib. You can receive the theme as a prop by using the withTheme hoc from Emotion. Read more about theming.

Storybook components

Addon authors can develop their UIs using any React library. But we recommend using Storybook’s own UI components in @storybook/components to build addons faster. When you use Storybook components you get:

• Battle-tested off-the-shelf components
• Storybook native look and feel
• Built-in support for Storybook theming

You can check them out in Storybook’s own storybook

Build system

When you are developing your addon as a package, you can’t use npm link to add it to your project. List your addon as a local dependency into your package.json:

{
  "dependencies": {
    "@storybook/addon-controls": "file:///home/username/myrepo"
  }
}

Run either yarn or npm install to install the addon.

Hot module reload

While developing your addon you can configure HMR (hot module replacement ) to reflect the changes made.

Standalone Storybook addons

If you're developing a standalone addon, add a new script to package.json with the following:

{
  "scripts":{
    "start": "npm run build -- --watch",
  }
}

Local Storybook addons

If you're developing a local Storybook addon (an addon built on top of a existing Storybook installation) HMR (hot module replacement) should be available out of the box. If you don't see the changes being reflected, add the flag --no-manager-cache to the storybook script and restart Storybook.