3 min read · Apr 8, 2018

Ant Design , Live Theme

If you are using Ant Design and want to update color related theme of your web app or want to use less for your custom styles then you are on right page.

In my use case, I was using Ant Design. I wanted to save color configurations mainly @primary-color and @text-color and don’t want to deploy whole new static build on AWS S3 for each different customer/tenant with his custom color settings. So updating colors at runtime using lessjs is a better solution but instead of loading all styles (including Ant Design styles and custom styles) what we can do is extract color related css using postcss plugin and replace colors with respective variable names like @primary-color and load this as less file.

.logo {
  width: 120px;
  height: 31px;
  color: #00375b;
  float: left;
}

// will be reduced to

.logo {
  color: #00375b;
}

// Same goes for all styles

So now with any means we can run less.modifyVars() to override the styles.

• Install `react-app-rewire-antd-theme`

yarn add react-app-rewire-antd-theme

• Add config-overrides.js file in project root directory and add following code in that file

const path = require('path');
const { updateConfig } = require('react-app-rewire-antd-theme');

const options = {
  varFile: path.join(__dirname, './src/styles/variables.less'),
  stylesDir: path.join(__dirname, './src/styles'),
  antDir: path.join(__dirname, './node_modules/antd'),
  colorFilePath: path.join(__dirname, './public/color.less'),
  themeVariables: [
    '@primary-color',
    '@secondary-color',
    '@text-color-secondary',
    '@text-color',
  ],
};
module.exports = function override(config, env) {
  config = updateConfig(config, env, options);
  return config;
};

• You need a /src/styles/variables.less file where you will define less variables. Specify theme variable names in above script which you want to update at runtime. You also need to specify other paths if your project structure is different and variablesfile’s name is different than variables.less . Don’t forget to import Ant Design default.less (antd/lib/style/themes/default.less) file in variables.less file.
• Add following lines in your index.html after your root or app div like this

<div id="root"></div>
<link rel="stylesheet/less" type="text/css" href="color.less" />
<script>
  window.less = {
    async: true,
    env: 'production',
  };
</script>
<script
  type="text/javascript"
  src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/less.js/2.7.2/less.min.js"
></script>

• Now you can write any kind of React component to update less vars. One option is to use a simple input to take color as input and on pressing some button you can call less.modifyVars()

import React from 'react';
import { Row, Col, Input, Button } from 'antd';

class ColorInput extends React.Component {
  state = { vars: { '@primary-color': '#dddddd' } };
  onChange = (e) => {
    const color = e.target.value;
    if (color.match(/^#[a-f0-9]{3,6}$/i)) {
      const vars = this.state.vars;
      vars['@primary-color'] = color;
      this.setState({ vars });
    }
  };
  updateVars = () => {
    window.less.modifyVars(this.state.vars).then(() => {
      console.log('Theme updated successfully');
    });
  };
  render() {
    return (
      <Row>
        <Col xs={16}>
          Primary Color: <Input onChange={this.onChange} />
        </Col>
        <Col xs={24}>
          <Button type="primary" onClick={this.updateVars}>
            Update Vars
          </Button>
        </Col>
      </Row>
    );
  }
}
export default ColorInput;

• Run npm start and you are good to go :) Sample project link is given below, enjoy…

Github: https://github.com/mzohaibqc/antd-theme-generator

Example Code: https://github.com/mzohaibqc/antd-theme-generator/tree/master/examples/customize-cra

Live Demo: https://mzohaibqc.github.io/antd-theme-generator/

Don’t forget to clap here and like on Github if it solves your problem.