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Recipes

Writing multi-variant styles with recipes in Chakra.

Overview

Chakra provides a way to write CSS-in-JS with better performance, developer experience, and composability. One of its key features is the ability to create multi-variant styles with a type-safe runtime API.

A recipe consists of these properties:

  • className: The className to attach to the component
  • base: The base styles for the component
  • variants: The different visual styles for the component
  • compoundVariants: The different combinations of variants for the component
  • defaultVariants: The default variant values for the component

Defining the recipe

Use the defineRecipe identity function to create a recipe.

button.recipe.ts

import { defineRecipe } from "@chakra-ui/react"

export const buttonRecipe = defineRecipe({
  base: {
    display: "flex",
  },
  variants: {
    visual: {
      solid: { bg: "red.200", color: "white" },
      outline: { borderWidth: "1px", borderColor: "red.200" },
    },
    size: {
      sm: { padding: "4", fontSize: "12px" },
      lg: { padding: "8", fontSize: "24px" },
    },
  },
})

Using the recipe

There are two ways to use the recipe in a component:

  • Directly in the component with useRecipe
  • Creating a component (recommended) with the chakra factory
info
RSC Tip: Adding the "use client" directive is required since it relies on react hooks like useContext and useInsertionEffect under the hood.

Directly in component

Use the useRecipe hook to get the recipe for a component. Then, call the recipe with its variant props to get the styles.

button.tsx

"use client"

import { chakra, useRecipe } from "@chakra-ui/react"
import { buttonRecipe } from "./button.recipe"

export const Button = (props) => {
  const { visual, size, ...restProps } = props

  const recipe = useRecipe({ recipe: buttonRecipe })
  const styles = recipe({ visual, size })

  return <chakra.button css={styles} {...restProps} />
}

splitVariantProps

Notice how the visual and size props were destructured from the props to be passed to the recipe. A smarter approach would be to automatically split the recipe props from the component props.

To do that, use the recipe.splitVariantProps function to split the recipe props from the component props.

button.tsx

"use client"

import { chakra, useRecipe } from "@chakra-ui/react"
import { buttonRecipe } from "./button.recipe"

export const Button = (props) => {
  const recipe = useRecipe({ recipe: buttonRecipe })
  const [recipeProps, restProps] = recipe.splitVariantProps(props)
  const styles = recipe(recipeProps)

  // ...
}

TypeScript

To infer the recipe variant prop types, use the RecipeVariantProps type helper.

button.tsx

import type { RecipeVariantProps } from "@chakra-ui/react"
import { buttonRecipe } from "./button.recipe"

type ButtonVariantProps = RecipeVariantProps<typeof buttonRecipe>

export interface ButtonProps
  extends React.PropsWithChildren<ButtonVariantProps> {}

Creating a component

Use the chakra function to create a component from a recipe.

Note: The recipe can also be inlined into the chakra function.

button.tsx

"use client"

import { chakra } from "@chakra-ui/react"
import { buttonRecipe } from "./button.recipe"

export const Button = chakra("button", buttonRecipe)

Next, use the component and pass recipe properties to it.

app.tsx

import { Button } from "./button"

const App = () => {
  return (
    <Button visual="solid" size="lg">
      Click Me
    </Button>
  )
}

Default Variants

The defaultVariants property is used to set the default variant values for the recipe. This is useful when you want to apply a variant by default.

button.tsx

"use client"

import { chakra } from "@chakra-ui/react"

const Button = chakra("button", {
  base: {
    display: "flex",
  },
  variants: {
    visual: {
      solid: { bg: "red.200", color: "white" },
      outline: { borderWidth: "1px", borderColor: "red.200" },
    },
    size: {
      sm: { padding: "4", fontSize: "12px" },
      lg: { padding: "8", fontSize: "24px" },
    },
  },
  defaultVariants: {
    visual: "solid",
    size: "lg",
  },
})

Compound Variants

Use the compoundVariants property to define a set of variants that are applied based on a combination of other variants.

button.tsx

"use client"

import { chakra } from "@chakra-ui/react"

const button = cva({
  base: {
    display: "flex",
  },
  variants: {
    visual: {
      solid: { bg: "red.200", color: "white" },
      outline: { borderWidth: "1px", borderColor: "red.200" },
    },
    size: {
      sm: { padding: "4", fontSize: "12px" },
      lg: { padding: "8", fontSize: "24px" },
    },
  },
  compoundVariants: [
    {
      size: "small",
      visual: "outline",
      css: {
        borderWidth: "2px",
      },
    },
  ],
})

When you use the size="small" and visual="outline" variants together, the compoundVariants will apply the css property to the component.

app.tsx

<Button size="small" visual="outline">
  Click Me
</Button>

Theme Usage

To use the recipe in a reusable manner, move it to the system theme and add it to theme.recipes property.

No need to add the "use client" directive when using the recipe in the theme.

theme.ts

import { createSystem, defineConfig } from "@chakra-ui/react"
import { buttonRecipe } from "./button.recipe"

const config = defineConfig({
  theme: {
    recipes: {
      button: buttonRecipe,
    },
  },
})

export default createSystem(config)

TypeScript

Use the CLI to generate the types for the recipe.

npx @chakra-ui/cli@next typegen ./theme.ts

Then, import the generated types in your component.

button.tsx

import type { RecipeVariantProps } from "@chakra-ui/react"
import { buttonRecipe } from "./button.recipe"

type ButtonVariantProps = RecipeVariantProps<typeof buttonRecipe>

export interface ButtonProps
  extends React.PropsWithChildren<ButtonVariantProps> {}

Update code

If you use the recipe directly in your component, update the useRecipe to use the key property to get the recipe from the theme.

button.tsx

const Button = () => {
-  const recipe = useRecipe({ recipe: buttonRecipe })
+  const recipe = useRecipe({ key: "button" })
  // ...
}

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