Configuration

Custom themes, tokens, shorthands, and media queries.

Note that you don't have to set up a design system with createTamagui at all, and that we have a variety of helpful presets if you'd like some of the upsides without having to set it up yourself.

To start, create a tamagui.config.ts in the root of your app. It should only be imported by the top-level file that has all your root providers to ensure no cycles exist in your imports.

Quick Start

You can use @tamagui/config which provides a complete config out of the box, the same one this site uses.

tamagui.config.tsimport { config } from '@tamagui/config/v3'
import { Text, View } from 'react-native'
import { createTamagui } from 'tamagui' // or '@tamagui/core'

const appConfig = createTamagui(config)

export type AppConfig = typeof appConfig

declare module 'tamagui' {
  // or '@tamagui/core'
  // overrides TamaguiCustomConfig so your custom types
  // work everywhere you import `tamagui`
  interface TamaguiCustomConfig extends AppConfig {}
}

export default appConfig

Then add Inter font to your index.html head for web:

index.html<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com">
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin>
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Inter:wght@100..900&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">

or App.tsx if using Expo:

App.tsximport { useFonts } from 'expo-font'

export default function App() {
  const [loaded] = useFonts({
    Inter: require('@tamagui/font-inter/otf/Inter-Medium.otf'),
    InterBold: require('@tamagui/font-inter/otf/Inter-Bold.otf'),
  })

  if (!loaded) {
    return null
  }

  return <>...</>
}

See Custom Font Family on Native under Font tokens for more info on Expo font loading.

You can also import parts of @tamagui/config/v3 separately, swapping out any piece for your own. The v3 config defaults to the CSS animation driver on the web and the built-in Animated driver on React Native.

Throughout this guide keep in mind that you should import from just one "ui" package - whether it's @tamagui/core or tamagui or it's your custom one.

Diverging from @tamagui/themes

You may fork from the built in themes (which in fairness are specific to the Tamagui website) by copying and pasting this gist into a themes.ts file next to your tamagui.config.ts.

From scratch

Let's start with an example of a complete tamagui.config.ts. Note that keys used here can be customized to your liking, and remember that they combine with your shorthands to give you a syntax like this:

<XStack bg="$red" w="$2" h="$1" />

tamagui.config.ts// @tamagui/core doesn't include `createMedia` so that it can avoid
// a dependency on react-native. If you are using tamagui, you can
// import createMedia from there directly and avoid this line:
import { createMedia } from '@tamagui/react-native-media-driver'
import { createFont, createTamagui, createTokens } from 'tamagui'

// Create a font:

// To work with the tamagui UI kit styled components (which is optional)
// you'd want the keys used for `size`, `lineHeight`, `weight` and
// `letterSpacing` to be consistent. The `createFont` function
// will fill-in any missing values if `lineHeight`, `weight` or
// `letterSpacing` are subsets of `size`.

const interFont = createFont({
  family: 'Inter, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif',
  size: {
    1: 12,
    2: 14,
    3: 15,
  },
  lineHeight: {
    // 1 will be 22
    2: 22,
  },
  weight: {
    1: '300',
    // 2 will be 300
    3: '600',
  },
  letterSpacing: {
    1: 0,
    2: -1,
    // 3 will be -1
  },
  // (native only) swaps out fonts by face/style
  face: {
    300: { normal: 'InterLight', italic: 'InterItalic' },
    600: { normal: 'InterBold' },
  },
})

// Set up our tokens

// The keys can be whatever you want, but we do recommend keeping them
// consistent across the different token categories and intended for
// usage together to make nice designs - eg for a Button to use.

const size = {
  0: 0,
  1: 5,
  2: 10,
  // ....
}

export const tokens = createTokens({
  size,
  space: { ...size, '-1': -5, '-2': -10 },
  radius: { 0: 0, 1: 3 },
  zIndex: { 0: 0, 1: 100, 2: 200 },
  color: {
    white: '#fff',
    black: '#000',
  },
})

const config = createTamagui({
  fonts: {
    // for tamagui, heading and body are assumed
    heading: interFont,
    body: interFont,
  },
  tokens,

  // For more on themes, see the Themes page
  themes: {
    light: {
      bg: '#f2f2f2',
      color: tokens.color.black,
    },
    dark: {
      bg: '#111',
      color: tokens.color.white,
    },
  },

  // For web-only, media queries work out of the box and you can avoid the
  // `createMedia` call here by passing the media object directly.
  // If you are going to target React Native, use `createMedia` (it's an identity
  // function on web so you can import it there without concern).
  media: createMedia({
    sm: { maxWidth: 860 },
    gtSm: { minWidth: 860 + 1 },
    short: { maxHeight: 820 },
    hoverNone: { hover: 'none' },
    pointerCoarse: { pointer: 'coarse' },
  }),

  // Shorthands
  // Adds <View m={10} /> to <View margin={10} />
  // See Settings section on this page to only allow shorthands
  // Be sure to have `as const` at the end
  shorthands: {
    px: 'paddingHorizontal',
    f: 'flex',
    m: 'margin',
    w: 'width',
  } as const,

  // Change the default props for any styled() component with a name.
  // We are discouraging the use of this and have deprecated it, prefer to use
  // styled() on any component to change it's styles.
  defaultProps: {
    Text: {
      color: 'green'
    },
  },
})

type AppConfig = typeof config

// this will give you types for your components
// note - if using your own design system, put the package name here instead of tamagui
declare module 'tamagui' {
  interface TamaguiCustomConfig extends AppConfig {}

  // if you want types for group styling props, define them like so:
  interface TypeOverride {
    groupNames(): 'a' | 'b' | 'c'
  }
}

export default config

The createTamagui function receives a configuration object:

tokens: Use createTokens to generate variables in your theme and app.

theme: Define your design theme, which map to CSS properties.

media: Define reusable responsive media queries.

shorthands: Define any props you want to expand to style values, keys being the shorthand and values being the expanded style prop.

defaultProps: For more advanced uses, you can override all named styled() components initial values. These merge downwards, so styled(Text, { name: 'Paragraph' }) will get any defaultProps set for Text.

onlyAllowShorthands: When set to true will ensure that if you define shorthands, they override existing long-form style props.

On Android you need to set the face option in createFont or else fonts won't pick up different weights, due to a React Native restriction.

Note, for tamagui (not core), it expects you to define a true token that maps to your default size, this way it knows what token to use by default. So you'd do something like this:

export const tokens = createTokens({
  size: {
    small: 20,
    medium: 30,
    true: 30, // note true = 30 just like medium, your default size token
    large: 40,
  },
  space: {
    small: 10,
    medium: 20,
    true: 20, // same goes for space and other token categories
    large: 30,
  },
})

The compiler will parse your tamagui.config.ts file at build-time. For this reason, we recommend keeping it relatively simple. Don't import heavy dependencies, and prefer to import createTamagui and other helpers directly from @tamagui/core.

Add Provider

Import and use the Tamagui Provider component at the top component in your app.

App.tsximport { TamaguiProvider } from 'tamagui'

import config from './tamagui.config'

export default function App() {
  return (
    <TamaguiProvider config={config}>
      <AppContents />
    </TamaguiProvider>
  )
}

Using Tamagui Provider

TamaguiProvider takes a few optional properties:

Props

defaultTheme (required)

string

The initial top level theme.

disableRootThemeClass

boolean

Disable inserting a theme class in the DOM or context, allowing you to manually place it higher. For custom use cases like integration with next-theme.

disableInjectCSS

boolean

By default Tamagui inserts CSS with a useInsertionEffect on load. But if you're setting up SSR you'll want to use getCSS() on the server instead and then turn on this setting.

If you use disableInjectCSS, you'll need to do something like this from the server:

<head>
  <style
    dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{
      __html: Tamagui.getCSS(),
    }}
  />
</head>

If you are using Next.js, see the Next.js guide for more information.

Including the reset css

There is an optional CSS reset that helps normalize styling, you can import it into your app like so:

import '@tamagui/core/reset.css'

You will have to turn isCSSEnabled on if you're using Metro as your web bundler. See Metro guide.

Setup media query driver

@tamagui/core doesn't provide media capabilities out of the box to native apps, while on the web it uses native media queries. To enable media queries for React Native, you need to provide matchMedia implementation:

yarn add @tamagui/react-native-media-driver

import { createMedia } from '@tamagui/react-native-media-driver'

export default createTamagui({
  media: createMedia({
    xs: { maxWidth: 660 },
    // ...
  }),
})

Optimizing further (Advanced)

import Tamagui from './tamagui.config'

const css = Tamagui.getCSS()
// insert into your head

Note that you can optimize this a bit by generating your CSS at build-time and then avoiding generating it on the client. This is covered in the Next.js Guide as it gives a good example of how to put all the pieces together properly, but you can apply it to any other framework.

To do this you would do something like this:

Tamagui.getCSS({
  // if you are calling getCSS on the server somewhere, you can add this { exclude: 'design-system' }
  // to your *client* side getCSS call to avoid more work and duplicate CSS generation.

  // Note that you call getCSS on both the server and client. This is what you'd write on the client.
  // It will ensure any CSS generated by your first render pass is available.
  exclude: process.env.NODE_ENV === 'production' ? 'design-system' : null,
})

For Next.js there's a nice option to outputCSS which will handle emitting a css file for you. But you can also just do this yourself by calling Tamagui.getCSS() with any other bundler or framework sometime in your pre-build or on the server and handing it over as CSS.

One final optimization you can make if you are serving getCSS from the server is setting the environment variable TAMAGUI_DOES_SSR_CSS to "true" for the client bundle only. One gotcha - if you plan on calling mutateTheme or addTheme at some point, set TAMAGUI_DOES_SSR_CSS to "mutates-themes". This will still give you the benefits of reduced bundle size, but avoids removing the entirety of the theme generation JS so it can mutate themes at runtime.

Most bundlers will then be able to shake out all the theme-related CSS generation code from @tamagui/core, saving ~2kb of minified JS. If you set outputCSS option with Next.js, this will be set automatically.

Make sure the style tag you insert with the getCSS styles is inserted after any react-native-web style tags to ensure Tamagui overrides those styles.

Tokens

Tokens have a structure inspired by but divergent from the Theme UI spec . They are mapped to CSS variables at build time.

Font tokens

The font tokens are a bit special and are created with createFont:

const interFont = createFont({
  family: 'Inter, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif',
  size: {
    1: 12,
    2: 14,
    3: 15,
    // ...
  },
  lineHeight: {
    1: 17,
    2: 22,
    3: 25,
    // ...
  },
  weight: {
    4: '300',
    6: '600',
  },
  letterSpacing: {
    4: 0,
    8: -1,
  },

  // for native only, alternate family based on weight/style
  face: {
    // pass in weights as keys
    700: { normal: 'InterBold', italic: 'InterBold-Italic' },
    800: { normal: 'InterBold', italic: 'InterBold-Italic' },
    900: { normal: 'InterBold', italic: 'InterBold-Italic' },
  },
})

Note, you don't need to use numbered keys, you can use sm or tiny or whatever you'd like. But you do want keep those keys consistent.

This gives you a lot of power over customizing every aspect of your design based on each font family. In other styling libraries that follow the Theme UI spec, you generally don't group your size/lineHeight/weight/etc tokens by the family, which means you are forced to choose a single vertical rhythm no matter the font.

Things to note:

The keys of size, lineHeight, weight, and letterSpacing are meant to match.

Define the full set of keys on size, the rest can be a subset.

Missing keys from partially defined objects will be filled in.

In the example above, weight is only defined at 4 and 6.

At creation Tamagui fills in the missing keys with previous value, or the next one if no previous exists. So weight 1 === 300, weight 5 === 300, and weight 7 === 600.

Custom Font Family on Native

You need to load your fonts for React Native to recognize them. Typically this looks something like if using Expo, (or you can follow a React Native guide here ):

App.tsximport { useFonts } from 'expo-font'

function App() {
  const [loaded] = useFonts({
    Inter: require("@tamagui/font-inter/otf/Inter-Medium.otf"),
    InterBold: require("@tamagui/font-inter/otf/Inter-Bold.otf"),
  });

  useEffect(() => {
    if (loaded) {
      // can hide splash screen here
    }
  }, [loaded])

  if (!loaded) {
    return null;
  }

  return <MyApp />
}

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Non-font tokens

The rest of the tokens categories besides font are flatter. The space and size generally share keys, and that space can generally use negative keys as well.

// passed into createTamagui
const tokens = createTokens({
  color: {
    white: '#fff',
    black: '#000',
  },
})

You access tokens then by using $ prefixes in your values. Tamagui knows which tokens to use based on the style property you use.

const App = () => (
  <Text fontSize="$lg" lineHeight="$lg" fontFamily="$mono" color="$white">
    Hello world
  </Text>
)

One final note: using tokens with themes. Tokens are considered a "fallback" to themes, so any values you define in your theme will override the token. The next section will explain this further.

Configuring tokens

There are a few settings that control how strict your style values are allowed to be, which are handled by the settings option of createTamagui. See the type strictness settings below.

Themes

Themes live one level below tokens. Tokens are your variables, where themes use those tokens to create consistent, generic properties that you then typically use in shareable components. Themes should generally only deal with colors.

Tamagui components in general expect a set of theme keys to be defined like the following, but you can deviate if you create your own design system.

const light = {
  background: '#fff',
  backgroundHover: tokens.color.gray2,
  backgroundPress: tokens.color.gray4,
  backgroundFocus: tokens.color.gray5,
  borderColor: tokens.color.gray4,
  borderColorHover: tokens.color.gray6,
  borderColorPress: tokens.color.gray12,
  borderColorFocus: tokens.color.gray11,
  color: tokens.color.gray10,
  colorHover: tokens.color.gray9,
  colorPress: tokens.color.gray8,
  colorFocus: tokens.color.gray8,
  shadowColor: tokens.color.grayA4,
  shadowColorHover: tokens.color.grayA6,
  shadowColorPress: tokens.color.grayA8,
  shadowColorFocus: tokens.color.grayA8,
  ...lightColors,
}

You don't have to use tokens as your theme values, but if you do they avoid some overhead. With Tamagui, the idea is that bg, color, and borderColor represent the "primary" and clearest colors, and bg2, color2 etc get more subtle.

To see how it works, here's a snippet from InteractiveFrame which is the frame component that's used in Button:

export const InteractiveFrame = styled(XStack, {
  borderRadius: '$1',
  paddingVertical: '$2',
  paddingHorizontal: '$3',
  backgroundColor: '$background',
  justifyContent: 'center',
  alignItems: 'center',
  cursor: 'pointer',
  flexWrap: 'nowrap',
  flexDirection: 'row',
  flexShrink: 1,

  hoverStyle: {
    backgroundColor: '$backgroundHover',
  },

  pressStyle: {
    backgroundColor: '$backgroundPress',
  },

  // ...
})

Media

For more full docs on media queries, see the useMedia docs page.

Animations

Choose one of @tamagui/animations-css for CSS transition based animations, @tamagui/animations-react-native for React Native Animated based animations, or @tamagui/animations-moti for Moti animations. You can swap them out per-platform as well, so long as you match the keys of the animations you pass in for each driver.

Add animations to createTamagui:

import { createAnimations } from '@tamagui/animations-react-native'

// pass this exported `animations` to your `createTamagui` call:
export const animations = createAnimations({
    bouncy: {
      damping: 9,
      mass: 0.9,
      stiffness: 150,
    },
    lazy: {
      damping: 18,
      stiffness: 50,
    },
  }),
})

Shorthands

Shorthands are defined on createTamagui. Here's an example of a partial shorthands configuration:

// the as const ensures types work with the optional `onlyAllowShorthands` option
const shorthands = {
  ac: 'alignContent',
  ai: 'alignItems',
  als: 'alignSelf',
  bblr: 'borderBottomLeftRadius',
  bbrr: 'borderBottomRightRadius',
  bg: 'backgroundColor',
  br: 'borderRadius',
  btlr: 'borderTopLeftRadius',
  btrr: 'borderTopRightRadius',
  f: 'flex',
  // ...
} as const

export default createTamagui({
  shorthands,
})

Which will enable usage like:

<View br="$myToken" />

where br expands into borderRadius.

For a full shorthands setup, see the @tamagui/shorthands source .

Others

Props

disableSSR

boolean

For SSR compatibility on the web, Tamagui will render once with the settings from mediaQueryDefaultActive set for all media queries. Then, it will render again after the initial render using the proper media query values. This is so that the hydrating components will match the server. Setting disableSSR to true will avoid this and instead immediately render using the up to date media state, which is the preferrable behavior for client-side only (SPA) style apps.

defaultFont

string

Map it to the regular key of the font given to createTamgui, so "body" or "heading" make sense as valiues here. This will ensure this font is the fallback for any views that don't define it.

mediaQueryDefaultActive

Record<string, boolean>

For the first render, determines which media queries are true (useful for SSR).

cssStyleSeparator

string

What's between each generated CSS style rule. Set as newline to more easily debug outputted CSS.

themeClassNameOnRoot

boolean

When using next-themes or anything that does SSR and attaches the theme class to the HTML tag, set this to true to have the proper CSS theme selectors generate

shouldAddPrefersColorThemes

boolean

Default:

true

Generates @media queries based on prefers-color-scheme for you if you have light/dark themes.

maxDarkLightNesting

number

Default:

3

(Advanced) On the web, tamagui treats "dark" and "light" themes as special and generates extra CSS to avoid having to re-render the entire page. This CSS relies on specificity hacks that multiply by your sub-themes. This prop sets the maximum number of nested dark/light themes you can do. Defaults to 3 for a balance, but can be higher if you nest them deeply.

onlyAllowShorthands

boolean

Will remove the type for the long-form versions of any shorthands you define.

selectionStyles

(theme) => ({ backgroundColor: Variable | string; color: Variable | string })

On the web, will generate ::selection styles for text selection.

settings

TamaguiSettings

See Settings section below.

Settings

Props

allowedStyleValues

AllowedStyleValuesSetting

Set up allowed values on style props, this is only a type-level validation (see below).

autocompleteSpecificTokens

boolean | 'except-special'

Set up if "specific tokens" ($color.name) are added to the types where tokens are allowed (see below).

mediaPropOrder

boolean

(beta) Will change the behavior of media styles. By default they have a fixed specificity: they always override any $theme- or $platform- styles. With this enabled, media styles will have the same precedence as the theme and platform styles, meaning that the order of the props determines if they override.

fastSchemeChange

boolean

(beta) On iOS, this enables a mode where Tamagui returns color values using DynamicColorIOS significantly speeding up dark/light re-renders. If you use theme inverse or manually change from light to dark without also changing the native color scheme, this will break. We're working on accounting for these last edge cases before removing the beta tag.

Type strictness

`allowedStyleValues`

false (default): allows any string (or number for styles that accept numbers)

strict: only allows tokens for any token-enabled properties

strict-web: same as strict but allows for web-specific tokens like auto/inherit

somewhat-strict: allow tokens or:

for space/size: string% or numbers

for radius: number

for zIndex: number

for color: named colors or rgba/hsla strings

somewhat-strict-web: same as somewhat-strict but allows for web-specific tokens

type AllowedValueSetting =
  | boolean
  | 'strict'
  | 'somewhat-strict'
  | 'strict-web'
  | 'somewhat-strict-web'

type AllowedStyleValuesSetting =
  | AllowedValueSetting
  | {
      space?: AllowedValueSetting
      size?: AllowedValueSetting
      radius?: AllowedValueSetting
      zIndex?: AllowedValueSetting
      color?: AllowedValueSetting
    }

`autocompleteSpecificTokens`

The VSCode autocomplete puts specific tokens above the regular ones, which leads to worse DX. If true this setting removes the specific token from types for the defined categories.

If set to except-special, specific tokens will autocomplete only if they don't normally use one of the special token groups: space, size, radius, zIndex, color.

Introduction

Tokens

Edit this page on GitHub.