The complete introduction to React spring

Hey, are you keen on discovering new possibilities with Hooke’s Law? Remember the following image that tells us how elasticity works?

Well, I’m not a Physics professor who introduce you to the world of how springs and hooks work, but I can show you how to achieve the same level of flexiblity on a React-based application through React Spring.

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What is React Spring?

React Spring is a spring-physics based animation library that gives all the necessary tools to make simple, yet powerful, animations and interactions via the different interpolations and transitions provided to us.

Understanding the spring

Before we start coding, let’s take a moment to appreciate Physics.

The term ‘spring’ is heavily involved with the React Spring library.

The following forces are applied to a spring attached to a certain point (A):

• Force of gravity.
• Acceleration of gravity.
• The spring force.

In the same fashion, we can describe a spring in React Spring library as something that:

Does NOT have a defined curve or a set duration.

Hence, all the animations are done in terms of time and curves. This is where React Spring comes into play.

Typically, we would have normal @keyframes animations in CSS that basically deal with time-based animation. Here, due to nature-inspired easing, the animations feel more natural.

What we’ll be making

First, we’ll make this basic transition to understand how things work:

Let’s spring it on!

Step 1: Installation

After you’ve created a new React project, open up your terminal window and run the following command:

npm install react-spring

This should install all the necessary files related to the library.

Step 2: The Toggle Component

Create a new file under the src/ folder of your project called Toggle.jsx.

Start with the usual stuff, like exporting the component and returning the div container, which has two children: the <h1> heading, “Hello” and next to the <button> “Toggle.”

Nothing fancy here; so, let’s add the ‘fancy’.

We’ll be using the useState Hook in order to handle the state of our toggle. Start by importing it and giving it the isToggled state variable. The initial value of the state should be set to false as we don’t want the toggle state to show at first.

const [isToggled, setIsToggled] = useState(false);

Next, to start using React Spring, we need to import the useSpring hook. This turns the normal value of an element into an animated-value.

Let’s name our animation, fade. Inside the useSpring hook object, we’ll define all the animations we need. As you can see in the demo above, when the toggle button is clicked, the text changes,

• Its color from black to green.
• Its font size from small to large.
• Its position.

As shown in the documentation, the useSpring hook takes in various properties like a normal CSS code. However, here we have a React Hook; so, we will pass the color, transform, and fontSize properties (notice the change in syntax compared to CSS) with the isToggled variable.

If the toggle has not changed its state, then the color would be #000; but, when it does change (when the button is pressed), we set it to green.

The same goes for the other two properties we want to animate:

const fade = useSpring({
    color: isToggled ? '#000' : 'green',
    transform: isToggled
      ? 'translate3d(0, 15px, 0)'
      : 'translate3d(0, 15px, 0)',
    fontSize: isToggled ? '2rem' : '3rem',
  });

Okay, but we still haven’t written the <button> functionality! Let’s write it.

We need to add an onClick event that passes in the setIsToggled Hook functionThis function’s job is to change the boolean value of isToggled variable..

<button onClick={() => setIsToggled(!isToggled)}>Toggle</button>

For the final part, we will use the animated prop provided by the library (make sure that you import it). We are going to add this prop to whichever element we want to animate. Here, by clicking the “Toggle” button, we want to animate the heading so, we change the tag from <h1> to <animated.h1>.

Step 3: Add the Toggle Component

Finally, go back to the App.js file and return the newly created component. You can also add some styling if you like.

function App() {
    return <Toggle />
}

As soon as you do this, you can play with your newly created spring animation! Notice that you didn’t have to care about the easing!

Take a step further

How about we move ahead and make this?

Looks exciting, right? It’s somewhat complex, though. Here’s what we need to do:

We’ll write the code inside App.js itself. Begin by importing the library:

import { useSpring, animated } from 'react-spring';

Inside the return() method, we have a single <animated.div /> that takes in two of React’s mouse synthetic events (onMouseMove and onMouseLeave) for the actions we need to perform. These take in the x and y coordinates inside the current viewport/container:

return (
    <animated.div
      onMouseMove={({ clientX: x, clientY: y }) => set({ xys: calcXY(x, y) })}
      onMouseLeave={() => set({ xys: [0, 0, 1] })}
      style={{ transform: props.xys.interpolate(perspective) }}
    />
  );

Here, we pass in the clientX and clientY to be calculated by the calcXY() function.

The calcXY function is a simple function that takes x and y as its arguments and uses DOM’s Window interface to get the respective width and height.

const calcXY = (x, y) => [
  -(y - window.innerHeight / 2) / 15,
  (x - window.innerWidth / 2) / 15,
  1.0,
];

To set the value of xys as desired, we make a new global constant and use the perspective(), rotateX(), rotateY(), and scale() properties.

const perspective = (x, y, s) =>
  `perspective(500px) 
   rotateX(${x}deg) 
   rotateY(${y}deg) 
   scale(${s})`;

Notice the use of JavaScript’s template literals to dynamically change the corresponding values. We have to use JavaScript’s template literals because it won’t work if we just declare the new perspective constant, and we need to use it inside the style attribute of the <animated.div /> tag as follows:

style={{ transform: props.xys.interpolate(perspective) }}

We pass the perspective inside the interpolate() function. As per the docs, the interpolate function is:

A function that takes either a function or an object that forms a range. Interpolations can also form chains that allow you to route one calculation into another or reuse them.

Now, it’s time for some more physics stuff. Inside useSpring(), we will first pass the default xys value (which simply translates to the X, Y, and Z coordinates in three dimensions). Then, using the config property, we can manually define how much mass, tension, and friction an element can have!

Exciting right? All of this is possible thanks to React Spring’s Common API. You can view all the examples and an interactive demo on their website.

As for the styling, it can be achieved quite easily with CSS:

.card {
  width: 30rem;
  height: 30rem;
  border-radius: 15px;
  background-image: url(https://images.pexels.com/photos/4870974/pexels-photo-4870974.jpeg?auto=compress&cs=tinysrgb&dpr=2&h=750&w=1260);
  background-size: cover;
  background-position: center center;
  box-shadow: 0px 10px 30px -5px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.3);
  transition: box-shadow 0.5s;
}

.card:hover {
  box-shadow: 0px 30px 100px -10px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4);
}

Here’s our entire spring code:

const calcXY = (x, y) => [
  -(y - window.innerHeight / 2) / 15,
  (x - window.innerWidth / 2) / 15,
  1.0,
];

const perspective = (x, y, s) =>
  `perspective(500px) rotateX(＄{x}deg) rotateY(＄{y}deg) scale(＄{s})`;

function App() {
  const [props, set] = useSpring(() => ({
    xys: [0, 0, 0.5],
    config: { mass: 5, tension: 200, friction: 100 },
  }));
  return (
    <animated.div
      className='card'
      onMouseMove={({ clientX: x, clientY: y }) => set({ xys: calcXY(x, y) })}
      onMouseLeave={() => set({ xys: [0, 0, 1] })}
      style={{ transform: props.xys.interpolate(perspective) }}
    />
  );
}

Complete code

I hope this clears your basic understanding of how you can animate your components in React Spring. There are a lot of other possibilities with this library. You can check all the examples out here.

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