Configuration

Create a tamagui.config.ts in the root of your app to set up your design system. It should only be imported by the top-level file that runs React.render, to ensure fast refresh works.

Quick Start

To get started more quickly, try out @tamagui/shorthands and @tamagui/theme-base to set up nice defaults for shorthands, themes and tokens:

import { shorthands } from '@tamagui/shorthands'
import { themes, tokens } from '@tamagui/theme-base'
import { createTamagui } from 'tamagui'

export default createTamagui({
  themes,
  tokens,
  shorthands,
})

Overview

Let's start with a full yet slimmed down tamagui.config.ts:

import { createFont, createTamagui, createTokens } from 'tamagui'

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,
  },
  // you may also set `transform` as textTransform values
  // and `style` as fontStyle values
})

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,
  themes: {
    light: {
      bg: '#f2f2f2',
      color: tokens.color.black,
    },
    dark: {
      bg: '#111',
      color: tokens.color.white,
    },
  },
  media: {
    sm: { maxWidth: 860 },
    gtSm: { minWidth: 860 + 1 },
    short: { maxHeight: 820 },
    hoverNone: { hover: 'none' },
    pointerCoarse: { pointer: 'coarse' },
  },

  // optional:

  // add custom shorthand props
  shorthands: {
    px: 'paddingHorizontal',
    f: 'flex',
    w: 'width',
  },

  // override default styles/props on every component
  defaultProps: {
    Text: {
      // override any default props here
    },
  },
})

type Conf = typeof config

// this will give you types for your components
declare module 'tamagui' {
  interface TamaguiCustomConfig extends Conf {}
}

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.

Note, for tamagui, it expects certain things on tokens. Space and size should both have 1-10 defined, as well as a value for true that maps to 4.

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

import Tamagui from './tamagui.config'

export default function App() {
  return <Tamagui.Provider>{/* The rest of your app here */}</Tamagui.Provider>
}

Using Tamagui Provider

Tamagui.Provider takes a few properties:

If you use disableInjectCSS, you'll need to use this somewhere to insert your CSS into head:

import Tamagui from './tamagui.config'

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

Tokens

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

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,
  },
})

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.

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.

If you'd like to enforce only allowing token values from your theme, you can override the ThemeValueFallback type in tamagui in your tamagui.config.ts, like so:

const config = createTamagui({
  ...yourConfig,
})

type Conf = typeof config

declare module 'tamagui' {
  interface TamaguiCustomConfig extends Conf {}
  // add this line:
  type ThemeFallbackValue = {}
}

This will change all special style properties that map to token/theme values to not accept strings or numbers. If you want to make exceptions, you can then add back in any general types by overriding one of the following: SizeTokens, FontTokens, FontSizeTokens, FontLineHeightTokens, FontWeightTokens, FontLetterSpacingTokens, FontStyleTokens, FontTransformTokens, SpaceTokens, ColorTokens, and ZIndexTokens.

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. See the source for the website  for a fuller example.

const light = {
  background: '#fff',
  backgroundHover: tokens.color.gray2,
  backgroundPress: tokens.color.gray4,
  backgroundFocus: tokens.color.gray5,
  backgroundTransparent: tokens.color.grayA1,
  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',
  },

  // ...
})

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

Shorthands are defined directly on your createTamagui call, rather than being attached to each component, to de-couple shorthands from components. This forces component kits to standardize on the basic react-native style syntax and ensures there's only one set of abbreviations defined ever.

Here's an example of a partial shorthands configuration:

const shorthands = {
  ac: 'alignContent',
  ai: 'alignItems',
  als: 'alignSelf',
  bblr: 'borderBottomLeftRadius',
  bbrr: 'borderBottomRightRadius',
  bc: 'backgroundColor',
  br: 'borderRadius',
  btlr: 'borderTopLeftRadius',
  btrr: 'borderTopRightRadius',
  f: 'flex',
  // ...
} as const

export default createTamagui({
  shorthands,
})

For a full configuration, see @tamagui/shorthands