Quick Start for Paste

The quickest way to get started with Paste is to bootstrap a new React app using one of our templates for popular React frameworks, Next.js and Create React App. Both approaches will create a new React app with Paste installed and ready for development.

You can use either Yarn or npm to bootstrap your project, but in these examples we will use Yarn.

Next.js is a framework for building React apps that use server-side rendering and create-next-app is an easy way to bootstrap a new Next app with minimal configuration.

Paste has a pre-made template for create-next-app that comes with @twilio-paste/core and @twilio-paste/icons as dependencies and uses TypeScript.

To create a new create-next-app app using the Paste template execute the following commands:

yarn create next-app --example https://github.com/twilio-labs/paste/tree/main/packages/paste-nextjs-template my-paste-app
cd my-paste-app
yarn dev

This starts your project in development mode and it can be seen at http://localhost:3000.

When you create the project, Paste is used in 2 files:

• pages/_app.tsx: creates a MyApp component, which wraps all pages. This is where the Paste <Theme.Provider> is added which enables any child component to use tokens.
• pages/index.tsx: a sample page with Paste components.

• yarn dev: runs project in development mode, with hot reloading
• yarn build: creates a production build of the project
• yarn start: runs the project in production mode, need to run yarn build first

To read more in depth about how create-next-app works, check out their documentation.

create-react-app initializes a new React project with minimal configuration.

Paste has a pre-made template for create-react-app that comes with @twilio-paste/core and @twilio-paste/icons as dependencies and uses TypeScript.

To create a new create-react-app app using the Paste template execute the following command:

yarn create react-app --template @twilio-paste my-paste-app
cd my-paste-app
yarn start

This starts your project in development mode and it can be seen at http://localhost:3000.

When you create the project, Paste is used in a few places:

• src/App.tsx: creates an App component, which wraps all pages. This is where the Paste <Theme.Provider> is added which enables any child component to use tokens.
• src/components: a directory with 2 sample components that use Paste components.
• src/pages/: a directory with 3 sample pages that use Paste components.

• yarn start: runs project in development mode, with hot reloading
• yarn build: creates a production build of the project
• yarn test: runs tests in watcher mode

To read more in depth about how create-react-app works, check out their documentation.

You can use the Paste components anywhere that is wrapped by the Theme Provider.

import {Box} from '@twilio-paste/core/box';
const Component = () => (
  <Box margin="space20" backgroundColor="colorBackground">
    Hello Paste!
  </Box>
);

The Paste Icons package provides icon components. They can be used to enhance the appearance of a web interface and break up the monotony of text. Icons have to be imported individually.

import {PlusIcon} from '@twilio-paste/icons/esm/PlusIcon';
const Component = () => (
  <Button variant="secondary" size="small" onClick={() => {}}>
    <PlusIcon decorative={true} />
    Add to cart
  </Button>
);

For more information about our icon system, checkout our usage guide here.