Setting up Storybook Composition with Nx
What is Storybook Composition
As explained in the Storybook official docs, Storybook Composition allows you to embed components from any Storybook inside your local Storybook. If you want to learn more about Storybook Composition, please take a look at the following articles, which explain it in detail:
How it works
In essence, you have a Storybook running, which will be the host of the embeded Storybooks as well. Then, you provide this "host" Storybook with a URL of a live/running Storybook. The composed Storybook is then displayed in a new Canvas iframe as part of the host Storybook, and is listed on the left-hand-side stories inventory, too. You can read more about this in the docs listed above.
How to use it
All you need is a URL of a live Storybook, and a "host" Storybook. In the .storybook/main.ts file of the "host" Storybook, inside module.exports you add a new refs attribute, which will contain the link(s) for the composed Storybook(s).
In the example below, we have a host Storybook running on local port 4400 (http://localhost:4400) - not displayed here. In it, we want to compose three other Storybooks. The "one-composed" and "two-composed", running on local ports 4401 and 4402 accordingly, as well as the Storybook Design System's Storybook which is live on the address that you see.
1// .storybook/main.ts of our Host Storybook - assuming it's running on port 4400
2import type { StorybookConfig } from '@storybook/react-vite';
3...
4
5const config: StorybookConfig = {
6 ...
7 refs: {
8 'one-composed': {
9 title: 'One composed',
10 url: 'http://localhost:4401',
11 },
12 'two-composed': {
13 title: 'Two composed',
14 url: 'http://localhost:4402',
15 },
16 'storybook-website-storybook': {
17 title: 'The Storybook of the Storybook website',
18 url: 'https://master--5ccbc373887ca40020446347.chromatic.com/',
19 },
20 },
21 ...
22};
23
24export default config;
25You can always read more in the official Storybook docs.
How to use it in Nx
It's quite easy to use this feature, in Nx and in general, since you do not need to make any code changes, you just need to have the "composed" Storybook instances (the ones you need to "compose") running, choose a "host" Storybook, and just add the composed Storybooks in it's .storybook/main.ts file.
Nx provides the run-many command, which will allow you to easily run multiple Storybooks at the same time. You need to run the run-many command with the parallel flag (eg. --parallel=3), because you want to run all your Storybooks in parallel. You can change the value of the parallel flag to be of as many Storybooks you want to run in parallel as you need. However, be very carefull with putting large numbers in this flag, since it can cause big delays or get stuck. You can play around and adjust that number to one your machine runs comfortably with. Keep in mind that you can add in this feature however many live/public Storybooks as you need (Storybooks that you do not run locally).
In order to get it working for you, you need to two things:
- Make sure your "composed" Storybook instances are running. For that you can do:
❯
nx run-many -t storybook -p one-composed two-composed three-composed --parallel=3
- Start your host Storybook in another tab of your terminal:
❯
nx storybook main-host
Before doing the above steps to actually compose our Storybook instances under the main-host project, we would need to do the following adjustments to our workspace:
Adjust the Storybook ports
By default, the storybook task for all projects uses the same port. This is problematic when it comes to setting up the Storybook Composition. We need to serve multiple Storybook instances (one per project) in parallel, and all of them are configured to be served in the same port. Storybook automatically assigns a random free port (usually adding 1 to the default port until it finds an empty port). This is not deterministic. There's no guarantee that the same port number will be assigned to the same project. Therefore, we wouldn't be able to create the proper configuration for Storybook Composition since we wouldn't know which URLs our composed Storybooks run on.
To solve this, we must statically set different ports for each project. We can keep the default port (or any set port) for the project serving as the host of our configuration, but we must change the port numbers for the rest of the projects that will be composed. Doing so ensures that each project will always use a known port, and we can correctly configure the Storybook Composition with the correct Storybook URLs.
1{
2 // ...
3 "targets": {
4 // ...
5 "storybook": {
6 "options": {
7 "port": 4401 // make sure to set a port different than the rest of the projects
8 }
9 }
10 }
11}
12Projects using inferred tasks might not have the storybook target defined in the project.json file, so you need to add the target with only the port option set.
If the project has the storybook target explicitly defined in the project.json file, you need to update or set the port option.
Add the refs to the host project's .storybook/main.ts file
To configure our composition, we need to add a refs object to our host project's main.ts file. An example of such a configuration looks like this:
1import type { StorybookConfig } from '@storybook/react-vite';
2// ...
3
4const config: StorybookConfig = {
5 // ...
6 refs: {
7 one-composed: {
8 title: 'One composed',
9 url: 'http://localhost:4401',
10 },
11 two-composed: {
12 title: 'Two composed',
13 url: 'http://localhost:4402',
14 },
15 three-composed: {
16 title: 'Three composed',
17 url: 'http://localhost:4403',
18 },
19 },
20 // ...
21};
22
23export default config;
24Optional: use run-commands and create a storybook-composition target
If you want to take advantage of the run-commands functionality of Nx, you can create a custom target that will invoke the run-parallel command for your "composed" Storybook instances.
The objective is to end up with a new target in your main-host's project.json file that looks like this:
1{
2 // ...
3 "targets": {
4 // ...
5 "storybook-composition": {
6 "executor": "nx:run-commands",
7 "options": {
8 "commands": [
9 "nx storybook one-composed",
10 "nx storybook two-composed",
11 "nx storybook three-composed"
12 ],
13 "parallel": true
14 }
15 }
16 }
17}
18which you can then invoke like this:
❯
nx run main-host:storybook-composition
which will take care of starting all your "composed" Storybook instances, before you run nx storybook main-host.
Generating a new target in our main-host
Let's first generate a new target called storybook-composition for our main-host.
Run the following command:
❯
nx generate nx:run-commands storybook-composition --command='nx storybook one-composed' --project=main-host
This will create a new target in your apps/main-host/project.json:
1{
2 // ...
3 "targets": {
4 // ...
5 "storybook-composition": {
6 "executor": "nx:run-commands",
7 "outputs": [],
8 "options": {
9 "command": "nx storybook one-composed"
10 }
11 }
12 }
13}
14Now, change the command option to be commands, add the "parallel": true option, and add all the other "composed" Storybook commands:
1{
2 // ...
3 "targets": {
4 // ...
5 "storybook-composition": {
6 "executor": "nx:run-commands",
7 "options": {
8 "commands": [
9 "nx storybook one-composed",
10 "nx storybook two-composed",
11 "nx storybook three-composed"
12 ],
13 "parallel": true
14 }
15 }
16 }
17}
18Now, you can start all your "composed" Storybook instances by running:
❯
nx run main-host:storybook-composition
After all of your "composed" Storybook instances have started, you can run in a new terminal:
❯
nx storybook main-host
This approach takes the "burden" of writing the run-many command manually, and makes it easier to add/remove "composed" Storybook instances.