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React Native Dark — Formidable, We build the modern web

react-native-dark is a minor augmentation of StyleSheet.create to support dynamic dark-mode styling with little hassle, made possible by babel.

A little, illustrative example:

import { StyleSheet, Text, View } from "react-native";

export default function App() {
  return (
    <View style={styles.container}>
      <Text style={styles.title}>Hello, world!</Text>
    </View>
  );
}

const styles = createStyleSheet({
  container: {
    flex: 1,
    backgroundColor: "white",
    // 🎉 dark mode 🎉
    $dark: {
      backgroundColor: "black",
    },
  },

  title: {
    color: "black",
    // 🎉 dark mode 🎉
    $dark: {
      color: "white",
    },
  },
});

Setup

Setup involves three steps.

Step 1: Installation

From a React Native (or Expo) project, install react-native-dark from npm:

npm install react-native-dark # npm
yarn add react-native-dark # yarn
pnpm add react-native-dark # pnpm

Step 2: Add the babel plugin

In your babel configuration (in e.g. babel.config.js), add the react-native-dark babel plugin:

module.exports = function() {
  return {
    // ...
    plugins: ["react-native-dark/plugin"], // 👈 add this
  };
};

Step 3: Add the TypeScript shim for StyleSheet.create

We'll also "shim" the type for StyleSheet.create to enhance the developer experience. Add a declaration file to your project, such as shim.d.ts and add the following line:

/// <reference types="react-native-dark/shim" />

Step 4: Go to town!

You're ready to start adding dark-mode styles to your app! See below for more details on usage.

Usage

The babel plugin and TS shim were built to make adding dark-mode support to your app as easy as just declaring dark-mode styles in your stylesheets. In a standard style declaration, just add a $dark field with the styles to be applied in dark mode! These styles will be applied on top of the baseline styles.

import { StyleSheet } from "react-native";

// ...

const styles = StyleSheet.create({
  card: {
    padding: 8,
    borderRadius: 8,
    backgroundColor: "lightblue",
    
    // 🪄 magic happens here 🪄
    $dark: {
      backgroundColor: "blue"
    }
  }
});

Now when you call styles.card within your function components, the value will be automagically dynamic based on color scheme preference.

Manually setting color mode

By default, $dark styles will be applied when the user's device color scheme preference is set to dark. However, you can manually override this behavior by wrapping a component tree in DarkModeProvider from react-native-dark.

import { DarkModeProvider } from "react-native-dark";

// Example of forcing dark mode and ignore user's color scheme preference
const App = () => {
  return (
    <DarkModeProvider colorMode="dark">
      <Body />
    </DarkModeProvider>
  )
}

The DarkModeProvider has a single colorMode prop that can accept:

  • "auto" (default) to respect user's color scheme preference;
  • "light" to force light mode;
  • "dark" to force dark mode.

🦄 Magical, but not magic

The babel plugin does the heavy lifting here and will turn code like the following:

import { StyleSheet, View } from "react-native";

export const App = () => {
  return <View style={styles.container} />;
}

const styles = StyleSheet.create({
  container: {
    flex: 1,
    backgroundColor: "white",
    
    $dark: {
      backgroundColor: "black"
    }
  }
});

into something like this:

import { StyleSheet, View } from "react-native";
import { useDarkMode } from "react-native-dark";

export const App = () => {
  const isDark = useDarkMode();
  
  return <View style={isDark ? __styles__container__$dark : styles.container} />;
}

const styles = StyleSheet.create({
  container: {
    flex: 1,
    backgroundColor: "white",
  },
  __container__$dark: {
    backgroundColor: "black"
  }
});

const __styles__container__$dark = StyleSheet.compose(styles.container, styles.__container__$dark);

This is a reasonable and performant approach that you might take by hand if you were implementing dark mode by hand. react-native-dark just cuts out the extra code for you. This, however, comes with a limitation or two...

Limitations

  1. Styles should be defined in the same file that they are referenced. E.g., don't import/export your styles object – define them in the same file that they're used.
  2. The dynamic support is handled by the useColorScheme hook from React Native, therefore this library only currently supports function components.
  3. Who knows, we'll probably find more limitations as we go 🤷‍