Configuration

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.

import { 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

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/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.

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,
  },
})

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

import { 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:

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

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

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

import '@tamagui/core/reset.css'

@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.

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,
  },

  // 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' },
  },
})

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 ):

import { 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 />
}

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.

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 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',
  },

  // ...
})

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

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 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 .

Type strictness

AllowedStyleValuesSetting:

Defaults to false:

• "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
• false (default) - allows any string (or number for styles that accept numbers)

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.