🎨 Northants Design Sytem

👉 You can view the design system here

The design system for North Northamptonshire & West Northamptonshire, two brand new unitary councils encompassing Wellingborough, Corby, Daventry, East Northants, Kettering, Northampton, Northamptonshire County and South Northants.

Requirements

Requires node v18 for Storybook v7. If you have nvm installed then you can run nvm use and it will autodetect the correct version of node to use.

Installation

Installation and development of the Design System

You need node and npm installed.

1. Clone the repo and npm i
2. npm run dev will start up the Storybook playground and start rollup watching for changes.

Installation using docker

This option is recommended if your using a windows machine

// build with no cache
docker-compose build --no-cache

// start the services
docker-compose up

// list the services
docker-compose ps

// list the containers
docker ps

// stop services
docker-compose stop

Documentation

This design system is made up from a combination of these libraries:

• Rollup
• Storybook to help you create and show off your components
• TypeScript
• Jest and React Testing Library enabling testing of the components

Examples

👉 You can view the design system here

This is a living documentation powered by Storybook, where you can see all the available components, their variations and documentation.

Using the design system in your project

You can find the design system here on NPM.

npm install northants-design-system

// Install peer dependencies
npm install react react-dom styled-components @reach/router

This design system uses theming - it will not work without a theme wrapped around the components - to use a theme you will need to include a ThemeProvider from styled components, you can find out more about how this works here. Then you will need to import one of the three themes from the design system, or create your own. The three avaliable are GDS_theme (a basic style based on the GDS design system), west_theme and north_theme (themes for North and West Northamptonshire styled components).

This ThemeProvider can be wrapped around the entire app, or around a single component

import { ThemeProvider } from 'styled-components';
import { GDS_theme } from "northants-design-system";

Import the components you'd like to use into your app. For example:

import React from "react"
import { Button } from "northants-design-system"

const MyComponent = () =>
    <Button text="Button Label" />

Each component has documentation in the design system explaining the avaliable props, how to use it, and any guidance on using it.

We are also using a CSS reset which you should add to your frontend when using this design system, to ensure the styles are correct.

Putting it all together

import React from "react"
import { Button } from "northants-design-system"
import { ThemeProvider } from 'styled-components';
import { GDS_theme } from "northants-design-system";

const MyComponent = () =>
  <ThemeProvider theme={GDS_theme}>
    <Button text="Button Label" />
  </ThemeProvider>

Documentation

Creating and generating new components

There is a util file under util called create-component.js. Instead of copy pasting components to create a new component, you can just run this command to generate all the files you need to start building out a new component. To use it:

npm run generate NewComponentName

This will generate:

/src
  /NewComponentName
    NewComponentName.tsx
    NewComponentName.stories.tsx
    NewComponentName.test.tsx
    NewComponentName.types.ts
    NewComponentName.styles.ts

The default templates for each file can be modified under util/templates.

Don't forget to add the component to your index.ts exports if you want the library to export the component.

How to publish a new version to NPM

First, make sure you have an NPM account and are logged into NPM using the npm login command.

1. information about testing needed here
2. If tests pass...
3. Increment the next version number in the package.json file.
4. npm publish. This will:
   • Run the tests
   • Bundle and transpile the code
   • Create and publish a tarball to NPM
5. If you are wanting to utilise the updated design system you will then need to update the version number of the design system in the package.json file within that repo.

Installing component library locally for IE11 (or other uses) but this is easier and less buggy

https://www.viget.com/articles/how-to-use-local-unpublished-node-packages-as-project-dependencies/

Good article on this can be found here

Install yalc globally
Using NPM: npm i yalc -g
Using Yarn: yarn global add yalc

In the northants-design-system
You will need node v14.17.3 > to build on windows

run yalc publish

In your other repository
run yalc add northants-design-system then run npm install or yarn

Then run npm run start to run the application.

You will need node v14.17.3 > to build on windows

Install yalc Using NPM:

npm i yalc -g

Using Yarn:

yarn global add yalc

run yalc publish in the design system folder

run yalc add northants-design-system in ie11-test-folder

npm install

to make changes and update them

in design system yalc push (this automatically updates all dependencies on all yalc files)

or yalc publish in design system and yalc update in your projects repo

Installing Component Library Locally

Let's say you have another project (test-app) on your machine that you want to try installing the component library into without having to first publish the component library. In the test-app directory, you can run:

npm i --save ../react-component-library

which will install the local component library as a dependency in test-app. It'll then appear as a dependency in package.json like:

  ...
  "dependencies": {
    ...
    "react-component-library": "file:../react-component-library",
    ...
  },
  ...

Your components can then be imported and used in that project.