Storybook 8

Just finishing up a Storybook based on the v8 beta and was pleasantly surprised how far it&#x27;s come along since I last tried it a few years ago. The auto docs (with the help of react-docgen) while still a bit rough on the edges and buggy in the new release is amazing. I wish the documentation was a bit better in some areas (the examples are usually repeated simple use cases from their demo content like a button) but I was able to achieve most of what I needed and then some.<p>For those wondering what the use case is, you must not have tried it. It does take work to set up (with each version that&#x27;s less), but it can be very nice to test in isolation esp in cases where a component is under a login, the 4th page of a 10 page form, etc. Also obviously if you&#x27;re working on a component library that ships without an app, Storybook can be your development and&#x2F;or demo app.

I used Storybook often, but the transition on each major release was painful.<p>The main issue is that Storybook provides an interface for the server and transpiler&#x2F;compiler process. So, if you already have Webpack, Vite, Parcel, or Next, you’ll need to configure SB to work with your toolchain. After many frustrations, I created an ad-hoc page using the import.meta.glob from Vite in my latest projects. Loading files utilizing a sub-set of SB CSF is easy, and that crappy ad-hoc playground covers 80% of my use cases, with the possibility of migrating to SB if I need more.<p>SB is very useful for anyone doing a DS, but now is too big for my needs.

Storybook is great and all, but these days nearly every Dependabot alert I get is about a sub-dependency of Storybook. Since Dependabot doesn&#x27;t currently allow you to ignore dev dependencies and only check production dependencies [0], this makes Storybook a Big Noise Generator and every time I dismiss another alert from it, I can&#x27;t help but wonder if there&#x27;s a better option out there.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dependabot&#x2F;dependabot-core&#x2F;issues&#x2F;2521">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dependabot&#x2F;dependabot-core&#x2F;issues&#x2F;2521</a>

I just tried Storybook this past week and it&#x27;s a great improvement even from version 6.x.<p>That said, I wish this was at a place where I could easily use it for the UI layer with simple integration into a given CMS. As others have stated, it&#x27;s great in isolation and for demos. Also, I realize that most apps and CMSes are so opinionated and using Storybook for the view of that system is a lot of overhead.<p>One less than stellar example is WordPress. It&#x27;s technically possible to create a headless app using Next.js or Remix on the front-end, Gutenberg for the data layer and authoring, and Storybook as the source of truth for both ends. However, it was so much work to get there.<p>Maybe a legacy PHP system trying to be modern isn&#x27;t a great example. But, then I&#x27;m stuck with any flavor of, usually paid database hosted, software like Contentful or Sanity. Again, the overhead!<p>I am a huge advocate for design systems that translate into component libraries, and Storybook fills part of that gap, but it&#x27;d be huge to see this type of setup become more practical.

I&#x27;d be curious to hear from everyone what&#x27;s the use case for using Storybook in 2024?<p>The only one I can think of is developing a UI library, but for the usual SPA development, it seems to me that MSW provides a much smoother and less obtrusive dev experience without affecting how my app is architected.