Overview

Congrats! You've installed React Native Elements and your immediate question goes something like this:

So umm, how do I change how it looks?

Great question! A UI Kit wouldn't be that useful if the apps everyone built looked the same right? For this case React Native Elements provide a number of props on each component to enable you to style them how you want.

Colors

Setting styles in the theme is as simple as using the name of the component, as a key and the props you want to change as the value.

import { ThemeProvider, createTheme } from '@rneui/themed';

const theme = createTheme({
  lightColors: {
    primary: '#e7e7e8',
  },
  darkColors: {
    primary: '#000',
  },
  mode: 'light',
});

const App = () => {
  return <ThemeProvider theme={theme}>{/* ... */}</ThemeProvider>;
};

Using the respective platform's native colors

You may want to style your app using the native color palette. You can do this using the colors object and the Platform API.

import { Platform } from 'react-native';
import { Button, lightColors, createTheme, ThemeProvider } from '@rneui/themed';

const theme = createTheme({
  lightColors: {
    ...Platform.select({
      default: lightColors.platform.android,
      ios: lightColors.platform.ios,
    }),
  },
});

const App = () => {
  return (
    <ThemeProvider theme={theme}>
      {/* This button's color will now be the default iOS / Android blue. */}
      <Button title="My Button" />
    </ThemeProvider>
  );
};

---

Component Styles

Every component from React Native Elements has a container around it. The container is just a traditional <View /> from react native that has some styling on it. This default styling prevents components from colliding with each other. If you want to change how two components react to each on the screen your first stop should be the containerStyle prop.

Similar to containerStyle, components may provide their custom style props like buttonStyle, titleStyle etc. Always refer to the documentation for the component to find out which style props it provides.

Theming Components

While component styles are great for single use, you may want to have the same styling for every instance of a component. For example, you may want all your buttons to be blue or have the same font. Here are some ways to reuse styles with React Native Elements.

Using Composition

With this approach, we create one component with the styles we want and use that instead of the built-in component.

import React from 'react';
import { Button } from '@rneui/themed';

const RaisedButton = (props) => <Button raised {...props} />;

// Your App
const App = () => {
  return <RaisedButton title="Yea" />;
};

If we want to use a button that's raised in our app, we can use RaisedButton instead of using Button. This component still accepts all the props from the normal Button just that it has the raised prop set by default.

---

Using ThemeProvider

The previous solution works great for only one component, but imagine having to do this for every component you want custom styles for. That could get a bit tedious to manage. Thankfully, there's a better way to do this.

import { ThemeProvider, Button, createTheme } from '@rneui/themed';

const theme = createTheme({
  components: {
    [themeKey]: {
      // ... props
    },
  },
});

const App = () => {
  return <ThemeProvider theme={theme}>{/* ... */}</ThemeProvider>;
};

note

If you do not specify theme in ThemeProvider, it would use defaultTheme

Order of Styles

What happens now if we want a Button that isn't raised? To do that we have to understand the order in which styles are applied.

Internal > Theme > External

Internal

Internal components styles are the styles which are defined in the component file. These are applied first.

Theme

Theme styles are the values that are set by the ThemeProvider If present, these are applied second.

import { ThemeProvider, Button, createTheme } from '@rneui/themed';

const theme = createTheme({
  components: {
    Button: {
      titleStyle: {
        color: 'red',
      },
    },
  },
});

const App = () => {
  return (
    <ThemeProvider theme={theme}>
      <Button title="My Button" />
    </ThemeProvider>
  );
};

This will override the white color for the title set in the component's style.

External

External styles are the styles which are set through the component props. These are applied last and have the highest precedence.

import { ThemeProvider, Button, createTheme } from '@rneui/themed';

const theme = createTheme({
  components: {
    Button: {
      titleStyle: {
        color: 'red',
      },
    },
  },
});

const App = () => {
  return (
    <ThemeProvider theme={theme}>
      <Button title="My Button" titleStyle={{ color: 'pink' }} />
    </ThemeProvider>
  );
};

This will override both the white color for the title set in the component's style as well as the red color set in the theme.

info

Remember if you want to override the values set in the theme you can always use component props.