docs/sharing/publish-storybook.mdx
Teams publish Storybook online to review and collaborate on works in progress. That allows developers, designers, PMs, and other stakeholders to check if the UI looks right without touching code or requiring a local dev environment.
<Video src="../_assets/sharing/storybook-workflow-publish.mp4" />First, we'll need to build Storybook as a static web application. The functionality is already built-in and pre-configured for most supported frameworks. Run the following command inside your project's root directory:
<CodeSnippets path="build-storybook-production-mode.md" /> <If renderer="angular">If you're using Angular, it's often better to use the Angular builder to build Storybook:
<CodeSnippets path="angular-builder-production.md" /> </If> <Callout variant="info" icon="💡"> You can provide additional flags to customize the command. Read more about the flag options [here](../api/cli-options.mdx). </Callout>Storybook will create a static web application capable of being served by any web server. Preview it locally by running the following command:
<CodeSnippets path="preview-storybook-production-mode.md" />By default, Storybook's production build will encapsulate all stories and documentation into the production bundle. This is ideal for small projects but can cause performance issues for larger projects or when decreased build times are a priority (e.g., testing, CI/CD). If you need, you can customize the production build with the test option in your main.js|ts configuration file and adjust your build script to enable the optimizations with the --test flag.
The Storybook app's UI supports modern browsers. If you need to run the app in older, unsupported browsers, you can use the --preview-only CLI flag to build Storybook in "preview-only" mode. This skips building the Storybook manager (the UI surrounding your stories) and only builds the preview (the iframe that contains your stories). That makes your Storybook builder and its configuration solely responsible for which browsers are supported.
When in "preview-only" mode, the normal entry point, /index.html, will result in a 404, because the client-side router is not available. To work around this, start from the /iframe.html route and add the ?navigator=true query parameter to the URL. This will render a basic, HTML-only sidebar inside the preview so that you can navigate to your stories. For example, you can access the preview at http://localhost:6006/iframe.html?navigator=true (you may need to update the port number).
This applies to both the build (for publishing) and dev (for local development) commands.
Once you've built your Storybook as a static web application, you can publish it to your web host. We recommend Chromatic, a free publishing service made for Storybook that documents, versions, and indexes your UI components securely in the cloud.
To get started, sign up with your GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, or email and generate a unique project-token for your project.
Next, install the Chromatic CLI package from npm:
<CodeSnippets path="chromatic-install.md" />Run the following command after the package finishes installing. Make sure that you replace your-project-token with your own project token.
npx chromatic --project-token=<your-project-token>
When Chromatic finishes, you should have successfully deployed your Storybook. Preview it by clicking the link provided (i.e., https://random-uuid.chromatic.com).
Build 1 published.
View it online at https://www.chromatic.com/build?appId=...&number=1.
Configure your CI environment to publish your Storybook and run Chromatic whenever you push code to a repository. Let's see how to set it up using GitHub Actions.
In your project's root directory, add a new file called chromatic.yml inside the .github/workflows directory:
Commit and push the file. Congratulations, you've successfully automated publishing your Storybook. Now whenever you open a PR you’ll get a handy link to your published Storybook in your PR checks.
Publishing Storybook as part of the development process makes it quick and easy to gather team feedback.
A common method to ask for review is to paste a link to the published Storybook in a pull request or Slack.
If you publish your Storybook to Chromatic, you can use the UI Review feature to automatically scan your PRs for new and updated stories. That makes it easy to identify what changed and give feedback.
When you publish Storybook, you also get component history and versioning down to the commit. That's useful during implementation review for comparing components between branches/commits to past versions.
Since Storybook is built as a static web application, you can also publish it to any web host, including GitHub Pages, Netlify, AWS S3, and more. However, features such as Composition, embedding stories, history, versioning, and assets may require tighter integration with Storybook APIs and secure authentication. If you want to know more about headers, you can refer to the Migration guide. Additionally, if you want to learn about the Component Publishing Protocol (CPP), you can find more information below.
To deploy Storybook on GitHub Pages, use the community-built Deploy Storybook to GitHub Pages Action. To enable it, create a new workflow file inside your .github/workflows directory with the following content:
Storybook can communicate with services that host built Storybooks online. This enables features such as Composition. We categorize services via compliance with the "Component Publishing Protocol" (CPP) with various levels of support in Storybook.
This level of service serves published Storybooks and makes the following available:
version=x.y.z query parameter (where x.y.z is the released version of the package)./index.json (formerly /stories.json) endpoint, which returns a list of stories and their metadata./metadata.json and the releases field.Example: Chromatic
This level of service can serve published Storybooks but has no further integration with Storybook’s APIs.
</details>If your Storybook is publicly viewable, you may wish to configure how it is represented in search engine result pages.
You can provide a description for search engines to display in the results listing, by adding the following to the manager-head.html file in your config directory:
You can prevent your published Storybook from appearing in search engine results by including a noindex meta tag, which you can do by adding the following to the manager-head.html file in your config directory: