You may have tried to use our quick start guide to setup your project for Storybook. If you want to set up Storybook manually, this is the guide for you.

This will also help you to understand how Storybook works.

Starter Guide Ember

Storybook has its own Webpack setup and a dev server.

In this guide, we will set up Storybook for your Ember project.

Table of contents

• Add @storybook/ember
• Setup environment
• Create the config file
• Write your stories
• Run your Storybook

Add @storybook/ember

First of all, you need to add @storybook/ember to your project. To do that, simply run:

npm i --save-dev @storybook/ember

If you don’t have package.json in your project, you’ll need to init it first:

npm init

Then add the following NPM script to your package json in order to start the storybook later in this guide:

In order for your storybook to run properly be sure to be either run ember serve or ember build before running any storybook commands.

{
  "scripts": {
    "storybook": "start-storybook -p 9001 -s dist"
  }
}

Setup environment

Adding preview-head.html

In order for storybook to register your ember application you must add the following file to .storybook/preview-head.html

These scripts may not contain everything you need, a good point of reference is to look at what is in the head tag in your applications dist/index.html file when you build.

<meta name="{ember-app-name}/config/environment" content="%7B%22modulePrefix%22%3A%22{ember-app-name}%22%2C%22environment%22%3A%22test%22%2C%22rootURL%22%3A%22/%22%2C%22locationType%22%3A%22auto%22%2C%22EmberENV%22%3A%7B%22FEATURES%22%3A%7B%7D%2C%22EXTEND_PROTOTYPES%22%3A%7B%22Date%22%3Afalse%7D%7D%2C%22APP%22%3A%7B%22name%22%3A%22{ember-app-name}%22%2C%22version%22%3A%224.0.0-alpha.23+4f61a2fb%22%7D%7D" />

<link integrity="" rel="stylesheet" href="./assets/vendor.css">
<link integrity="" rel="stylesheet" href="./assets/{ember-app-name}.css">

<script src="./assets/vendor.js"></script>
<script>
  runningTests = true;
</script>
<script src="./assets/{ember-app-name}.js"></script>

Adding the runningTests script is extremely important don’t forget to add this as it will result in your application binding multiple times.

Substitute ember-app-name with the name of your ember application.

This is found by going to package.json and referencing the name field

Adding .env

A file named .env is needed in the root directory with the following contents:

STORYBOOK_NAME={ember-app-name}

Create the config file

Storybook can be configured in several different ways. That’s why we need a config directory. We’ve added a -c option to the above NPM script mentioning .storybook as the config directory.

For the basic Storybook configuration file, you don’t need to do much, but simply tell Storybook where to find stories.

To do that, simply create a file at .storybook/config.js with the following content:

import { configure } from '@storybook/ember';

function loadStories() {
  require('../stories/index.js');
  // You can require as many stories as you need.
}

configure(loadStories, module);

That’ll load stories in ../stories/index.js.

Write your stories

Now you can write some stories inside the ../stories/index.js file, like this:

It is import that you import the hbs function that is provided by a babel plugin in @storybook/ember

import hbs from 'htmlbars-inline-precompile';
import { storiesOf } from '@storybook/ember';

storiesOf('Demo', module)
  .add('heading', () => hbs`<h1>Hello World</h1>`)
  .add('button', () => {
    return {
      template: hbs`<button {{action onClick}}>
        Hello Button
      </button>`
    },
    context: {
      onClick: (e) => console.log(e)
    }
  })
  .add('component', () => {
    return {
      template: hbs`{{foo-bar
        click=onClick
      }}`,
      context: {
        onClick: (e) => console.log(e)
      }
    }
  });

If you are using an older version of ember <= 3.1 please use this story style

import { compile } from 'ember-source/dist/ember-template-compiler';
import { storiesOf } from '@storybook/ember';

storiesOf('Demo', module)
  .add('heading', () => compile(`<h1>Hello World</h1>`))
  .add('button', () => {
    return {
      template: compile(`<button {{action onClick}}>
        Hello Button
      </button>`),
      context: {
        onClick: (e) => console.log(e)
      }
    }
  })
  .add('component', () => {
    return {
      template: compile(`{{foo-bar
        click=onClick
      }}`),
      context: {
        onClick: (e) => console.log(e)
      }
    }
  });

A story is either:

1. A single handlebars fragment generated using the hbs function
2. An object that contains template and context that will be bound to the resulting element

In order to get your storybook to get new changes made to the foo-bar or any other components that are defined in your Ember app you must run ember serve as a sidecar for the build files to get generated.

Run your Storybook

Now everything is ready. Simply run your storybook with:

npm run storybook

Now you can change components and write stories whenever you need to.