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Basics

@material-ui/styles

You can use Material-UI's styling solution in your app, whether or not you are using Material-UI components.

Material-UI aims to provide a strong foundation for building dynamic UIs. For the sake of simplicity, we expose the styling solution used in Material-UI components as the @material-ui/styles package. You can use it, but you don't have to, since Material-UI is also interoperable with all the other major styling solutions.

Why use Material-UI's styling solution?

In previous versions, Material-UI has used LESS, then a custom inline-style solution to write the component styles, but these approaches have proven to be limited. We have adopted a CSS-in-JS solution. It unlocks many great features (theme nesting, dynamic styles, self-support, etc.). We think that this is the future:

Material-UI's styling solution is inspired by many other styling libraries such as styled-components and emotion.

Installation

To install and save in your package.json dependencies, run:

// with npm
npm install @material-ui/styles

// with yarn
yarn add @material-ui/styles

Getting started

We provide 3 different APIs to generate and apply styles, however they all share the same underlying logic.

Hook API

import React from 'react';
import { makeStyles } from '@material-ui/styles';
import Button from '@material-ui/core/Button';

const useStyles = makeStyles({
  root: {
    background: 'linear-gradient(45deg, #FE6B8B 30%, #FF8E53 90%)',
    border: 0,
    borderRadius: 3,
    boxShadow: '0 3px 5px 2px rgba(255, 105, 135, .3)',
    color: 'white',
    height: 48,
    padding: '0 30px',
  },
});

export default function Hook() {
  const classes = useStyles();
  return <Button className={classes.root}>Hook</Button>;
}

Styled components API

Note: this only applies to the calling syntax – style definitions still use a JSS object. You can also change this behavior, with some limitations.

import React from 'react';
import { styled } from '@material-ui/styles';
import Button from '@material-ui/core/Button';

const MyButton = styled(Button)({
  background: 'linear-gradient(45deg, #FE6B8B 30%, #FF8E53 90%)',
  border: 0,
  borderRadius: 3,
  boxShadow: '0 3px 5px 2px rgba(255, 105, 135, .3)',
  color: 'white',
  height: 48,
  padding: '0 30px',
});

export default function StyledComponents() {
  return <MyButton>Styled Components</MyButton>;
}

Higher-order component API

import React from 'react';
import PropTypes from 'prop-types';
import { withStyles } from '@material-ui/styles';
import Button from '@material-ui/core/Button';

const styles = {
  root: {
    background: 'linear-gradient(45deg, #FE6B8B 30%, #FF8E53 90%)',
    border: 0,
    borderRadius: 3,
    boxShadow: '0 3px 5px 2px rgba(255, 105, 135, .3)',
    color: 'white',
    height: 48,
    padding: '0 30px',
  },
};

function HigherOrderComponent(props) {
  const { classes } = props;
  return <Button className={classes.root}>Higher-order component</Button>;
}

HigherOrderComponent.propTypes = {
  classes: PropTypes.object.isRequired,
};

export default withStyles(styles)(HigherOrderComponent);

Nesting selectors

You can nest selectors to target elements inside the current class or component. The following example uses the Hook API, but it works the same way with the other APIs.

const useStyles = makeStyles({
  root: {
    padding: 16,
    color: 'red',
    '& p': {
      color: 'green',
      '& span': {
        color: 'blue'
      }
    }
  },
});
This is red since it is inside the paper.

This is green since it is inside the paragraph and this is blue since it is inside the span

Adapting based on props

You can pass a function to makeStyles ("interpolation") in order to adapt the generated value based on the component's props. The function can be provided at the style rule level, or at the CSS property level:

const useStyles = makeStyles({
  // style rule
  foo: props => ({
    backgroundColor: props.backgroundColor,
  }),
  bar: {
    // CSS property
    color: props => props.color,
  },
});

function MyComponent() {
  // Simulated props for the purpose of the example
  const props = { backgroundColor: 'black', color: 'white' };
  // Pass the props as the first argument of useStyles()
  const classes = useStyles(props);

  return <div className={`${classes.foo} ${classes.bar}`} />
}

This button component has a color property that changes its color:

Adapting the hook API

Adapting the styled components API

Adapting the higher-order component API

Stress test

In the following stress test, you can update the theme color and the background-color property live:

const useStyles = makeStyles(theme => ({
  root: props => ({
    backgroundColor: props.backgroundColor,
    color: theme.color,
  }),
}));
rendered 1 times
color: #ffffff
backgroundColor: #2196f3