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React Live Playground

By Thomas Wang
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October 25, 2019  ▴  1 minute read 🥤🥤
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Look down, you can preview and edit this React code in real time! 🤯

Pretty cool, right?

Instructions and Sample code

You can get this exact thing in your React project, too – a blog, documentation site, whatever!

First install the react-live-playground NPM package to a React project. Then, simply import it as a regular component and use it as you wish. Make sure to include pass the code prop as a string, which can be either pure JSX, a pure functional component, or a React class component. For the full list of props, see the package README!

Sample

button.mdx
import ReactLivePlayground from "react-live-playground"
import theme from "prism-react-renderer/themes/ultramin"

export const code = `
function Button() {
  return (
    <div style={{display: 'flex', justifyContent: 'center'}}>
      <button
        onClick={() => alert("Hello World!")}
        style={{
          border: 'none',
          textAlign: 'center',
          boxSizing: 'border-box',
          textDecoration: 'none',
          padding: '10px 40px',
          cursor: 'pointer',
          background: '#D4AF37',
          background: 'linear-gradient(to bottom, #D4AF37 0%, #C5A028 100%)',
          boxShadow: '0 4px 6px rgba(50, 50, 93, .11), 0 1px 3px rgba(0, 0, 0, .08)',
          color: 'white',
          fontSize: '18px', fontWeight: '700',
          borderRadius: '25px'
        }}
      >
        Gold button
      </button>
    </div>
  )
}
`.trim()

<ReactLivePlayground code={code} theme={theme} />

Note: This sample from above was written in a .mdx file, which is an extension of .md files that lets you use JSX in your Markdown.

I recently refactored gatsby-personal-starter-blog to include MDX. If you also have a Gatsby blog, it’s a cool feature to have to show off React components in your blog posts. React Live Playground can be used in a regular React .js file just fine though!

How and why I built this

The good folks over at Formidabble make some pretty dope tools. They made component-playground and more recently react-live, which I wrapped to make this component.

I made this component because although the React Live Demo (demo folder) is nice, having the preview side-by-side with the code is too narrow for my blog. Also, to use React Live out-of-the-box, you have to include 4 separate components: <LiveProvider />. <LiveEditor />. <LiveError />, and <LivePreview />.

I’m a believer that things should just work, and making this component solved this problem for me. I hope it might be helpful for you as well!

⚛

© 2019 - 2021, Thomas Wang.