Skip to content
Edit this page

Style Library Interoperability

While it is simple to use the JSS based styling solution provided by Material-UI to style your application, it is possible to use any styling solution you prefer, from plain CSS to any number of CSS-in-JS libraries.

This guide aims to document the most popular alternatives, but you should find that the principals applied here can be adapted to other libraries. There are examples for the following styling solutions:

Plain CSS

Nothing fancy, plain old CSS.

PlainCssButton.css

.button {
  background: linear-gradient(45deg, #fe6b8b 30%, #ff8e53 90%);
  border-radius: 3px;
  border: 0;
  color: white;
  height: 48px;
  padding: 0 30px;
  box-shadow: 0 3px 5px 2px rgba(255, 105, 135, .3);
}

PlainCssButton.js

import React from 'react';
import Button from '@material-ui/core/Button';

export default function PlainCssButton() {
  return (
    <div>
      <Button>Material-UI</Button>
      <Button className="button">Plain CSS</Button>
    </div>
  );
}

Edit Button

Note: JSS injects its styles at the bottom of the <head>. If you don't want to mark style attributes with !important, you need to change the CSS injection order, as in the demo.

Global CSS

Explicitly providing the class names to the component is too much effort? You can target the class names generated by Material-UI.

GlobalCssButton.css

.MuiButton-root {
  background: linear-gradient(45deg, #fe6b8b 30%, #ff8e53 90%);
  border-radius: 3px;
  border: 0;
  color: white;
  height: 48px;
  padding: 0 30px;
  box-shadow: 0 3px 5px 2px rgba(255, 105, 135, .3);
}

GlobalCssButton.js

import React from 'react';
import Button from '@material-ui/core/Button';

export default function GlobalCssButton() {
  return (
    <div>
      <Button>Global CSS</Button>
    </div>
  );
}

Edit Button

Note: JSS injects its styles at the bottom of the <head>. If you don't want to mark style attributes with !important, you need to change the CSS injection order, as in the demo.

Styled Components

stars npm

The styled() method works perfectly on all of the components.

import React from 'react';
import styled from 'styled-components';
import Button from '@material-ui/core/Button';
import NoSsr from '@material-ui/core/NoSsr';

const StyledButton = styled(Button)`
  background: linear-gradient(45deg, #fe6b8b 30%, #ff8e53 90%);
  border-radius: 3px;
  border: 0;
  color: white;
  height: 48px;
  padding: 0 30px;
  box-shadow: 0 3px 5px 2px rgba(255, 105, 135, 0.3);
`;

export default function StyledComponents() {
  return (
    <NoSsr>
      <div>
        <Button>Material-UI</Button>
        <StyledButton>Styled Components</StyledButton>
      </div>
    </NoSsr>
  );
}

Edit Button

Controlling Priority

Note: Both styled-components and JSS inject their styles at the bottom of the <head>. The best approach to ensuring styled-components styles are loaded last is to change the CSS injection order, as in the demo:

import { StylesProvider } from '@material-ui/core/styles';

<StylesProvider injectFirst>
  {/* Your component tree.
      Styled components can override Material-UI's styles. */}
</StylesProvider>

Another approach is to use the && characters in styled-components to bump up specificity by repeating the class name. Avoid the usage of !important.

Deeper elements

If you attempt to style a Drawer with variant permanent, you will likely need to affect the Drawer's child paper element. However, the paper is not the root element of Drawer and therefore styled-components customization as above will not work. You need to use the classes API of Material-UI.

The following example overrides the label style of Button in addition to the custom styles on the button itself. It also works around this styled-components issue by "consuming" properties that should not be passed on to the underlying component.

import React from 'react';
import styled from 'styled-components';
import Button from '@material-ui/core/Button';
import NoSsr from '@material-ui/core/NoSsr';

const StyledButton = styled(({ color, ...other }) => <Button {...other} />)`
  background: linear-gradient(45deg, #fe6b8b 30%, #ff8e53 90%);
  border: 0;
  color: white;
  height: 48px;
  padding: 0 30px;
  box-shadow: 0 3px 5px 2px rgba(255, 105, 135, 0.3);

  & .MuiButton-label {
    color: ${props => props.color};
  }
`;

export default function StyledComponentsDeep() {
  return (
    <NoSsr>
      <div>
        <Button>Material-UI</Button>
        <StyledButton color="papayawhip">Styled Components</StyledButton>
      </div>
    </NoSsr>
  );
}

The above demo relies on the default classes values but you can provide your own class name: .label.

import React from 'react';
import styled from 'styled-components';
import Button from '@material-ui/core/Button';

const StyledButton = styled(({ color, ...other }) => (
  <Button classes={{ label: 'label' }} {...other} />
))`
  background: linear-gradient(45deg, #fe6b8b 30%, #ff8e53 90%);
  border: 0;
  color: white;
  height: 48px;
  padding: 0 30px;
  box-shadow: 0 3px 5px 2px rgba(255, 105, 135, 0.3);

  & .label {
    color: ${props => props.color};
  }
`;

export default function StyledComponentsDeep() {
  return (
    <div>
      <Button>Material-UI</Button>
      <StyledButton color="papayawhip">Styled Components</StyledButton>
    </div>
  );
}

ThemeProvider

Material-UI has a rich theme structure that you can leverage for the color manipulations, the transitions, the media queries, and more.

<NoSsr>
  <ThemeProvider theme={defaultTheme}>
    <StyledButton>Styled Components</StyledButton>
  </ThemeProvider>
</NoSsr>

Portals

The Portal provides a first-class way to render children into a DOM node that exists outside the DOM hierarchy of the parent component. Because of the way styled-components scopes its CSS, you may run into issues where styling is not applied.

For example, if you attempt to style the Menu of a Select component using the property MenuProps, you will need to pass along the className property to the element being rendered outside of it's DOM hierarchy. The following example shows a workaround:

import React from 'react';
import styled from 'styled-components';
import Menu from '@material-ui/core/Menu';
import MenuItem from '@material-ui/core/MenuItem';

const StyledMenu = styled(({ className, ...props }) => (
  <Menu {...props} classes={{ paper: className }} />
))`
  box-shadow: none;
  border: 1px solid #d3d4d5;

  li {
    padding-top: 8px;
    padding-bottom: 8px;
  }
`;

CSS Modules

stars

It's hard to know the market share of this styling solution as it's dependent on the bundling solution people are using.

CssModulesButton.css

.button {
  background: linear-gradient(45deg, #fe6b8b 30%, #ff8e53 90%);
  border-radius: 3px;
  border: 0;
  color: white;
  height: 48px;
  padding: 0 30px;
  box-shadow: 0 3px 5px 2px rgba(255, 105, 135, .3);
}

CssModulesButton.js

import React from 'react';
// webpack, parcel or else will inject the CSS into the page
import styles from './CssModulesButton.css';
import Button from '@material-ui/core/Button';

export default function CssModulesButton() {
  return (
    <div>
      <Button>Material-UI</Button>
      <Button className={styles.button}>CSS Modules</Button>
    </div>
  );
}

Edit Button

Note: JSS injects its styles at the bottom of the <head>. If you don't want to mark style attributes with !important, you need to change the CSS injection order, as in the demo.

Emotion

stars npm

The css prop

Emotion's css() method works seamlessly with Material-UI.

/** @jsx jsx */
import { jsx, css } from '@emotion/core';
import Button from '@material-ui/core/Button';

export default function EmotionCSS() {
  return (
    <div>
      <Button>Material-UI</Button>
      <Button
        css={css`
          background: linear-gradient(45deg, #fe6b8b 30%, #ff8e53 90%);
          border-radius: 3px;
          border: 0;
          color: white;
          height: 48px;
          padding: 0 30px;
          box-shadow: 0 3px 5px 2px rgba(255, 105, 135, 0.3);

          & .MuiButton-label {
            color: papayawhip;
          }
        `}
      >
        Emotion
      </Button>
    </div>
  );
}

Edit Button

Note: JSS injects its styles at the bottom of the <head>. If you don't want to mark style attributes with !important, you need to change the CSS injection order, as in the demo.

The styled() API

It works exactly like styled components. You can use the same guide.

React JSS

stars npm

Material-UI's styling solution shares many building blocks with react-jss. A fork was needed in order to handle Material-UI's unique needs, but with the intent to merge the changes and fixes from Material-UI back to react-jss.

import React from 'react';
import PropTypes from 'prop-types';
import injectSheet from 'react-jss';
import Button from '@material-ui/core/Button';

const styles = {
  button: {
    background: 'linear-gradient(45deg, #FE6B8B 30%, #FF8E53 90%)',
    borderRadius: 3,
    border: 0,
    color: 'white',
    height: 48,
    padding: '0 30px',
    boxShadow: '0 3px 5px 2px rgba(255, 105, 135, .3)',
  },
};

function ReactJssButton(props) {
  return (
    <div>
      <Button>Material-UI</Button>
      <Button className={props.classes.button}>react-jss</Button>
    </div>
  );
}

ReactJssButton.propTypes = {
  classes: PropTypes.object.isRequired,
};

export default injectSheet(styles)(ReactJssButton);

Edit Button