Getting Started - Ant Design

Ant Design React is dedicated to providing a good development experience for programmers. Before starting, it is recommended to learn React first, and correctly install and configure Node.js v16 or above.

The official guide also assumes that you have intermediate knowledge about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and React. If you are just starting to learn front-end or React, it may not be the best idea to use the UI framework as your first step.

Finally, if you are working in a local development environment, please refer to Use with create-react-app.

Your First Example

Here is a simple online codesandbox demo of an Ant Design component to show the usage of Ant Design React.

import React from 'react';
import { Button, Space, DatePicker, version } from 'antd';

const App = () => (
  <div style={{ padding: '0 24px' }}>
    <h1>antd version: {version}</h1>
    <Space>
      <DatePicker />
      <Button type="primary">Primary Button</Button>
    </Space>
  </div>
);

export default App;

Follow the steps below to play around with Ant Design yourself:

1. Create a codesandbox

Visit https://u.ant.design/codesandbox-repro to create a codesandbox -- don't forget to press the save button as well to create a new instance.

2. Use and modify an antd component

Replace the contents of index.js with the following code. As you can see, there is no difference between antd's components and typical React components.

If you have already set things up by following the Use with create-react-app, replace the content of /src/index.js as follows:

import React, { useState } from 'react';
import { DatePicker, message } from 'antd';
import { createRoot } from 'react-dom/client';

import './index.css';

const App = () => {
  const [date, setDate] = useState(null);
  const [messageApi, contextHolder] = message.useMessage();
  const handleChange = (value) => {
    messageApi.info(`Selected Date: ${value ? value.format('YYYY-MM-DD') : 'None'}`);
    setDate(value);
  };
  return (
    <div style={{ width: 400, margin: '100px auto' }}>
      <DatePicker onChange={handleChange} />
      <div style={{ marginTop: 16 }}>
        Selected Date: {date ? date.format('YYYY-MM-DD') : 'None'}
      </div>
      {contextHolder}
    </div>
  );
};

createRoot(document.getElementById('root')).render(<App />);

3. Explore more components

You can view the list of components in the side menu of the Components page, such as the Alert component. Plenty of examples are also provided in the component pages and API documentation as well.

Click the "Open in Editor" icon in the first example to open an editor with source code to use out-of-the-box. Now you can import the Alert component into the codesandbox:

- import { DatePicker, message } from 'antd';
+ import { DatePicker, message, Alert } from 'antd';

Now add the following jsx inside the render function.

<DatePicker onChange={value => this.handleChange(value)} />
  <div style={{ marginTop: 20 }}>
-   Selected Date: {date ? date.format('YYYY-MM-DD') : 'None'}
+   <Alert message="Selected Date" description={date ? date.format('YYYY-MM-DD') : 'None'} />
  </div>

Select a date, and you can see the effect in the preview area on the right:

codesandbox screenshot

OK! Now that you know the basics of using antd components, you are welcome to explore more components in the codesandbox. When reporting a bug with ant design, we also strongly recommend using codesandbox to provide a reproducible demo as well.

4. Next Steps

During actual real-world project development, you will most likely need a development workflow consisting of compile/build/deploy/lint/debug/ deployment. You can read the following documents on the subject or use the following scaffolds and examples provided below:

Test with Jest

If you use create-react-app follow the instructions here instead.

Jest does not support esm modules, and Ant Design uses them. In order to test your Ant Design application with Jest you have to add the following to your Jest config :

"transform": { "^.+\\.(ts|tsx|js|jsx)?$": "ts-jest" }

Import on Demand

antd supports tree shaking of ES modules, so using import { Button } from 'antd'; would drop js code you didn't use.

Customize your Workflow

If you want to customize your workflow, we recommend using webpack or vite to build and debug code. You can try out plenty of boilerplates available in the React ecosystem.

There are also some scaffolds which have already been integrated into antd, so you can try and start with one of these and even contribute.