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Component Library plugin for Craft CMS

A complete component library system for building, previewing, and maintaining front-end web components, fully-integrated with Craft CMS.

The built-in browser-based library viewer allows you to traverse or search your component folder to preview each component, and displays helpful details about the component template, context data, and component documentation.

The plugin is CSS and Javascript-framework agnostic, and can support any folder structure, including nested and hierarchical component structures to support atomic design principles.

The demo respository includes code samples for use with Vite and includes a full matrix block implementation using a companion context loader plugin.

Requirements

This plugin requires Craft CMS 4.10.0 or later, and PHP 8.2 or later.

This plugin can work with any front-end build system (webpack, mix, etc), but uses Plugin Vite under the hood. A fully functional demo using Vite on the front-end can be found in the Component Library Demo repo.

Configuration

Optionally create a component-library.php file in your Craft config directory.

Sample config:

• browser.enabled - <default: true>. Enables or disables the component library browser. This disables the front-end standalone viewer for components only, template loading is still functional.
• browser.requiresLogin <default: false> Requires user login to access the component library browser. The browser must be enabled for this setting to take effect.
• browser.path <default: component-library> The URL path for accessing the component library browser from the site root.
• browser.welcome <default: ''> The handle of the markdown component to display as the welcome page.
• browser.preview <default: @preview> Default template to use as the preview on all components that do not have a specific preview template in their settings. See Previews for more information.
• root <default: 'library'> The root directory of the component library, default is a folder called library in the craft application folder.
• docs <default: '@root/docs'> The directory where the markdown files are stored.
• aliases <default: []> Custom shorthand aliases for directories inside the component library. See Aliases and handles for more information.

Components

Components are simply folders in your component library directory that contain a twig template file and other related files. The component library browser will automatically detect and make these components available anywhere in your Craft templates.

A component folder must contain a twig template file, and typically also includes a context file (*.config.json or *.config.php) with the configuration information and context data to populate the template. Component folders also often include .css or .scss files for styling, .js or .ts files for interactivity, and may include a readme.md file to document usage.

Components can include or extend other components and their data, offering the ability to compose more complex components and even full layouts within the library browser. A simple example might be a single card component, which includes a heading component and an image component. The card component might then be included by a cards group, which is then included in a blog page layout.

Note: The plugin is front-end agnostic and is not responsible for compiling the component CSS or Javascript of your components. Any front-end framework and build-system can be supported. We've included an example Vite immplementation in the demo repository.

The handle for each component is defined by the path of the component inside the library.

Example:

If you have a button component in the following directory:

You can include it in your Craft templates by using:

If a component directory and filename are identical (case sensitive), you can use a shortened form of the handle:

Aliases and Handles

When dealing with nested directories or long handles it can be useful to define aliases to shorter handles.

Example: With this structure:

Instead of using the full path:

You can define an alias in component-library.php:

Now, include the component like this:

And in fact, the shortened handle of this component is simply:

Another use case for aliases to is force the sort order of top-level folders, for example when implementing an atomic design folder hierarchy. For example, our folder names might look like: 01-atoms, 02-molecules, 03-organisms

With this folder structure:

By adding aliases to our config:

You can now call the button component with:

Component Configuration and Context

Each component will have its own configuration file to define its settings and context.

The purpose of the context is to enable the component to be developed and previewed in isolation without the need of real data comming from the CMS. When developing in the library a component is provided with a mock data object that can be used to preview the component in different states.

To create a configuration file for a component you need to create a config.php or a config.json file in the same folder and using the same name as the component.

A simple example might look like this:

Inside the configuration file you can define the following properties:

After defining the config file you can make use of the context object in the component template like so:

Component Variants

Components often have multiple implementations, called variants. For example, a single button component might have a primary and a secondary variant. Variants can also useful for testing focus or disabled states. Variants can be defined through context, additional template files, or both. Let's try a couple of examples.

File-based variants

Create a file-based variant by adding a new twig file with the same name and a double dash suffix. Given the following directory structure:

You can include the button component and its primary variant using:

You can also define a different path structure for your components library like:

And include them using:

Context-based variants

Context-based variants are defined by an additional variants array in your context definition. Here you can see we've added multiple heading levels to heading.config.json:

Variants will inherit the context from the root component when not defined. So this means that in the example above the content property will be available in the variant contexts.

Referencing other components

Component template files can reference one another:

cta.twig:

Additionally you can reference other components context by using the component alias like so:

cta.config.php:

or

When using php configuration files you are free to use any PHP code to define the context object in more complex ways. We find useful to include a library to mock data like Faker. Here's an example for a Heading component with multiple variants, all populated with content generated by Faker:

Previews

The library browser will render the components preview using the preview template defined in the component configuration file. If no preview template is defined the default preview template will be used. The preview template is a regular twig file declared in the library. You would normally define a preview template to use your components under a single folder like so:

In button.config.php you would define the preview template to use like so:

and the preview is normally the base layout HTML wrapper for your components like so:

You may also want to use your live site layout to preview your components. You can do this by customizing the contents of your preview.twig like so:

Where {{yield|raw}} will be replaced with the HTML ouput of the component being rendered and _layouts/_site is the path under your craft/templates directory.

Since previews are only meant to be used indirectly by each component there is no need to have them accessible from the browser. You can hide them by setting the hidden property in the configuration file like so:

Component Library documentation

You can document your component library at the root project level as well as the individual component level.

Project documentation

Project documentation can be added as a folder of markdown files in the /docs directory of your component library folder. The library browser will automatically detect and make these files available. All *.md files are parsed with the Craft Markdown Filter using the gfm flavor. See full syntax and formatting in the docs.

Additionally you can use any of the markdown files as the welcome page for the library browser by setting the browser.welcome config (see Configuration).

Component documentation

Each component can have its own documentation by creating a markdown file with the same name as the component. For example, if you have a button component you can create a button.md file next to the button.twig file. The markdown file will be parsed and displayed in the toolbar tab of the component preview.

Example:

Vite Integration

The component library includes full Vite support. The plugin internally uses nystudio107/craft-vite to provide a seamless integration with the Vite build system. This allows you to use the latest ES6+ features, SCSS, PostCSS, and more in your components. See our sample Vite implementation in the Component Library Demo repo.

Using your components in Craft

It's possible to load your components directly into your Craft twig templates by passing along the necessary data, like so:

This can get tiresome when working with more complex groups of components or when data needs additional formatting. We prefer to use Craft's template hooks to format data and inject into the entry context. This can be done by creating a custom module:

craft/modules/pagecontext/components/HomepageEntryContext.php

craft/templates/homepage/entry.twig

More examples are included in the Component Library Demo repository. We've also included examples using the Block Loader plugin to format and populate more complex matrix block data.