Install and use Storybook in a demo page

Question

I am creating a personal project in TypeScript. It should be a library that exports React components and TypeScript functions. The idea is therefore to publish this library on npm in the future. There is also a demo page within the project and this is where I would like to use Storybook to test React components.

This is the structure of the project:

.
├── demo/              # demo page
│   └── Home.tsx       # where I would like to use Storybook
│   └── index.html
│   └── index.tss
│   └── style.css
├── dist/              # distributable version of app built using Parcel
├── node_modules/      # npm managed libraries
├── src/               # project source code
│   └── lib/           # folder for your library
│      └── myFuncion.ts # function to export
│      └── MyComponent.tsx # react component to export
│   └── index.ts    # app entry point (it simply contains the exports of myFunction and myComponent)
├── .eslintrc.js
├── .gitignore
├── package.json
├── tsconfig.json
├── ...

I have read the Storybook documentation and it recommends to install Storybook by running npx sb init. I tried but the problem is that the stories are put in the project src directory, not in the demo page:

.
├── demo/              # demo page
│   └── Home.tsx       # where I would like to use Storybook
│   └── index.html
│   └── index.tss
│   └── style.css
├── dist/              # distributable version of app built using Parcel
├── node_modules/      # npm managed libraries
├── src/               # project source code
│   └── lib/           # folder for your library
│      └── myFuncion.ts # function to export
│      └── MyComponent.tsx # react component to export
│   └── stories/    # Storybook <<---
│   └── index.ts    # app entry point (it simply contains the exports of myFunction and myComponent)
├── .eslintrc.js
├── .gitignore
├── package.json
├── tsconfig.json
├── ...

And the storybook script that is created is this:

"scripts": {
    "storybook": "start-storybook -p 6006",
    "build-storybook": "build-storybook"
},

but I would like something like:

"scripts": {
    "storybook:demo": "start-storybook -p 6006",
    "build-storybook:demo": "build-storybook"
},

So how can I install and use Storybook only on the demo page?

Answer 1

Looks like you're ultimately trying to have multiple source directories. This is supported by both TypeScript and Storybook, it just needs a bit of configuration.

tsconfig.json should have the include option set to:

"include": [ "src", "demo" ]

This tells TypeScript (or its Babel loader) to compile files in src and demo.

.storybook/main.js should have the stories option set to:

stories: [
  '../demo/**/*.stories.mdx',
  '../demo/**/*.stories.@(js|jsx|ts|tsx)',
],

This specifies which files should be interpreted as stories and in our case it would load *.stories.mdx/js/jsx/ts/tsx recursively from the demo folder.

Also note that the stories folder is just an example folder created by Storybook and you can safely delete it. Stories can be in any of the directories processed by TypeScript as long as it matches the patterns specified in .storybook/main.js.

You can even have multiple Storybooks with multiple configs in a single project, but that may not be what you're after. Just in case, though, the command would be start-storybook -p 6006 -c path/to/config/.storybook