Storybook is a development environment for UI components. It allows you to browse a component library, view the different states of each component, and interactively develop and test components.

This guide will briefly walk you through using Storybook within an Nx workspace.

Storybook 7 by default

Starting with Nx 16, Storybook 7 is going to be used by default to configure your projects.

Setting Up Storybook

Add the Storybook plugin

Using Storybook

Generating Storybook Configuration

You can generate Storybook configuration for an individual project with this command:

nx g @nx/storybook:configuration project-name
Nx 15 and lower use @nrwl/ instead of @nx/

If you are NOT using a framework-specific generator, in the field uiFramework you must choose one of the following Storybook frameworks:

  • @storybook/angular
  • @storybook/html-webpack5
  • @storybook/nextjs
  • @storybook/preact-webpack5
  • @storybook/react-webpack5
  • @storybook/react-vite
  • @storybook/server-webpack5
  • @storybook/svelte-webpack5
  • @storybook/svelte-vite
  • @storybook/sveltekit
  • @storybook/vue-webpack5
  • @storybook/vue-vite
  • @storybook/vue3-webpack5
  • @storybook/vue3-vite
  • @storybook/web-components-webpack5
  • @storybook/web-components-vite

Choosing one of these frameworks will have the following effects on your workspace:

  1. Nx will install all the required Storybook packages that go with it.

  2. Nx will generate a project-level .storybook folder (located under libs/your-project/.storybook or apps/your-project/.storybook) containing the essential configuration files for Storybook.

  3. Nx will create new targets in your project's project.json, called storybook and build-storybook, containing all the necessary configuration to serve and build Storybook.

  4. Nx will generate a new Cypress e2e app for your project (if there isn't one already) to run against the Storybook instance.

Make sure to use the framework-specific generators if your project is using Angular, React, Next.js or React Native: @nrwl/angular:storybook-configuration, @nrwl/react:storybook-configuration, @nrwl/react-native:storybook-configuration, for example:

nx g @nrwl/angular:storybook-configuration my-angular-project

These framework-specific generators will also generate stories for you.

Configure your project using TypeScript

You can choose to configure your project using TypeScript instead of JavaScript. To do that, just add the --tsConfiguration=true flag to the above command, like this:

nx g @nx/storybook:configuration project-name --tsConfiguration=true
Nx 15 and lower use @nrwl/ instead of @nx/

Here is the Storybook documentation if you want to learn more.

Running Storybook

Serve Storybook using this command:

nx run project-name:storybook

or

nx storybook project-name

Building Storybook

Build Storybook using this command:

nx run project-name:build-storybook

or

nx build-storybook project-name

Anatomy of the Storybook setup

When running the Nx Storybook generator, it'll configure the Nx workspace to be able to run Storybook seamlessly. It'll create a project specific Storybook configuration.

The project-specific Storybook configuration is pretty much similar what you would have for a non-Nx setup of Storybook. There's a .storybook folder within the project root folder.

<project root>/ ├── .storybook/ │ ├── main.js │ ├── preview.js │ ├── tsconfig.json ├── src/ ├── README.md ├── tsconfig.json └── etc...

Using Addons

To register a Storybook addon for all storybook instances in your workspace:

  1. In your project's .storybook/main.js file, in the addons array of the module.exports object, add the new addon:

    <project-path>/.storybook/main.js
    module.exports = { stories: [...], ..., addons: [..., '@storybook/addon-essentials'], };

  2. If a decorator is required, in each project's <project-path>/.storybook/preview.js, you can export an array called decorators.

    <project-path>/.storybook/preview.js
    import someDecorator from 'some-storybook-addon'; export const decorators = [someDecorator];

More Documentation

You can find dedicated information for React and Angular:

You can find all Storybook-related Nx documentation here.

For more on using Storybook, see the official Storybook documentation.

Migration Scenarios

Here's more information on common migration scenarios for Storybook with Nx. For Storybook specific migrations that are not automatically handled by Nx please refer to the official Storybook page