The Complete Guide to Building a Vue.js Component Library

Welcome! 👋

Initially, this series was intended to be a single article, but it soon became apparent that it would be too lengthy. Even GitHub didn't want to display it in the file tab of pull requests. Therefore, I decided to divide it into multiple articles to make it more digestible and to focus on each part individually.

This series is somewhat of a sequel to the article The Simplest Method to Create a Vue.js Component Library but adopts a more professional approach. You will learn how the most popular component libraries are constructed behind the scenes and how to create your own.

While it's still my preferred method when I am certain about what I want to achieve, I also received feedback from readers seeking more custom behavior and requiring more complex features.

That's understandable. While unbuild is a powerful tool, it cannot match the flexibility, plugin ecosystem, and adoption of Vite.

Throughout this series, we will address the following topics:

1. Getting Started with Monorepo, Linter, and Formatter: We'll set up a monorepo to manage our component library and all the tools necessary to ensure a good development experience. We'll also configure ESLint to ensure code consistency.
2. Building a First Component with Vue.js and Tailwind CSS: We'll create our first component with Vue.js, Tailwind CSS, and Tailwind Variants using the most advanced and powerful techniques employed in popular component libraries like Radix Vue and Nuxt UI.
3. A Better Development Experience with TypeScript and TSConfig: We'll enhance our development experience by adding TypeScript to our component library and configuring TSConfig to ensure that our components are typed correctly and that we can take full advantage of TypeScript's features.
4. Automatic Component Testing with Vitest and Testing Library: We'll write tests for our components using Vitest and Testing Library to ensure that our components function as expected. This is crucial for a professional component library that remains reliable over time.
5. Delivering Components Continuously and with Confidence: We'll establish a continuous integration process to ensure that our components are always delivered with confidence. For every commit of every branch, we'll run our tests to verify everything is functioning correctly. We'll also establish a release process to publish our components to npm.
6. Creating a Playground and a Storybook for Components: We'll create a playground to test our components in a real environment and a storybook with Histoire to document them. This will enable us to share our components with other developers and to test them in various scenarios, both in isolation and in combination.
7. Enhancing Integration with Unplugin and Nuxt Module: We'll enhance the integration of our component library with the ecosystem by creating a Vite plugin with Unplugin Vue Components and a Nuxt module to utilize our components in a Nuxt application.

By the end of this series, you will have a complete Vue.js component library that you can use in your projects or share with the community, like a professional developer. Isn't that exciting? 😎

Feel free to comment below if you have any questions or suggestions. Let's get started!