storybook/docs/pages/basics/slow-start-guide/index.md

id	title
slow-start-guide	Slow Start Guide

You may have tried to use our quick start guide to setup your project for Storybook. If you want to set up Storybook manually, this is the guide for you.

This will also help you to understand how Storybook works.

Basics

Storybook has its own Webpack setup and a dev server. Webpack setup is very similar to Create React App, but allows you to configure as you want.

In this guide, we are trying to set up Storybook for your React project.

Add @storybook/react

First of all, you need to add @storybook/react to your project. To do that, simply run:

npm i --save-dev @storybook/react

Add react and react-dom

Make sure that you have react and react-dom in your dependencies as well:

npm i --save react react-dom

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

{
  "scripts": {
    "storybook": "start-storybook -p 9001 -c .storybook"
  }
}

Create the config file

Storybook can be configured in several different ways. That’s why we need a config directory. We've added a -c option to the above NPM script mentioning .storybook as the config directory.

For the basic Storybook configuration file, you don't need to do much, but simply tell Storybook where to find stories.

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

import { configure } from '@storybook/react';

function loadStories() {
  require('../stories/index.js');
  // You can require as many stories as you need.
}

configure(loadStories, module);

That'll load stories in ../stories/index.js.

Just like that, you can load stories from wherever you want to.

Write your stories

Now you can write some stories inside the ../stories/index.js file, like this:

import React from 'react';
import { storiesOf } from '@storybook/react';
import { action } from '@storybook/addon-actions';

storiesOf('Button', module)
  .add('with text', () => (
    <button onClick={action('clicked')}>Hello Button</button>
  ))
  .add('with some emoji', () => (
    <button onClick={action('clicked')}>😀 😎 👍 💯</button>
  ));

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

1. with text
2. with some emoji

Run your Storybook

Now everything is ready. Simply run your storybook with:

npm run storybook

Then you can see all your stories, like this:

Now you can change components and write stories whenever you need to. You'll get those changes into Storybook in a snap with the help of Webpack's HMR API.