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Use Storybook to build and review UI components in isolation: install it in your frontend project, create stories for the states you need to support, and use those stories for component-level development and testing. Add accessibility and visual checks where they help, then keep full-application end-to-end tests for user journeys that need the running app and backend.
What Storybook adds to a frontend project
Storybook is a frontend workshop that runs alongside your application. It renders components or pages in isolation, so you can work through UI states without starting the full app. A story is a repeatable example of a rendered state; a component can have several stories for variants and edge cases.
This makes the catalog useful both while implementing a component and when checking whether the project already has a suitable pattern. Storybook’s installation guide describes its CLI as examining project dependencies and suggesting an available configuration.
Install Storybook in the existing project
- Open a terminal at the frontend project’s repository root.
- Run
npm create storybook@latest. - Review the configuration proposed for your framework and bundler, along with generated scripts and sample stories.
- Start Storybook using the script the CLI added to the project’s package manifest, and confirm that a sample story renders.
The CLI and its compatibility requirements can change. Check the live installation guide for supported framework, runtime, package-manager, and browser versions when setting up; do not rely on a copied version list from an older guide.
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Build a useful story catalog
Start with the states developers and reviewers need to see, rather than trying to represent every theoretical combination. For each important component, consider its ordinary state, meaningful variants, and states that can be easy to miss when the component is only viewed inside the application.
- Default or ordinary state.
- Important variants, such as sizes or visual treatments.
- Empty, loading, and error states where relevant.
- Edge cases that affect layout or behavior and matter to users.
Browse the catalog before creating another pattern. Storybook’s documented discovery flow is to find a suitable component, inspect its stories for a fitting variant, and reuse the story definition in application code while connecting it to real data. See Why Storybook? for the product’s overview of this workflow.
Use stories to test behavior and accessibility
Interaction checks
Use interaction tests for important user actions and their expected outcomes—for example, whether a control responds to an action and whether the resulting state is correct. Stories can be reused as cases in Vitest or Jest. Storybook’s testing guide recommends the Vitest addon for projects that use Vite; consult the testing documentation for current setup details.
Accessibility checks
The accessibility addon audits the rendered DOM against axe-core rules and reports violations, passes, and incomplete cases. Storybook’s accessibility page says the addon automatically catches up to 57% of WCAG issues; treat that as Storybook’s stated figure, not as a guarantee that a component is accessible or that every issue will be found. Incomplete results need human review.
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Choose the addon’s todo behavior to surface existing findings as warnings, or error when violations should fail tests or CI. Automated checks are an initial QA layer: manually review cases the tool marks incomplete and accessibility questions that automated rules cannot settle. See Storybook’s accessibility testing guide.
Choose the right test layer for the failure
| Check | What it helps answer | Limitation or trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Interaction/component | Does the component respond correctly to an important user action? | Does not by itself cover every browser, integration, or full-application path. |
| Accessibility | Are there detectable rule violations in this rendered state? | Automated scans miss some issues; incomplete findings need manual review. |
| Visual regression | Did the rendered appearance change from an accepted baseline? | A reviewer must decide whether a difference is intended or a regression. |
| Unit/snapshot | Did logic or rendered markup differ from an expected result? | Snapshots can require upkeep; other story-based checks may provide broader useful coverage. |
| End-to-end | Does a full-stack user flow work in the application? | Requires the running application stack and covers a broader, different layer. |
These checks complement each other. Use component-level checks for specific states and actions; use end-to-end tests with Playwright, Cypress, or another suitable tool when the flow depends on the real application and backend. Storybook’s testing guide describes its testing options.
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When visual regression testing is useful
Visual tests capture story screenshots and compare them with accepted baselines, helping catch unintended appearance changes. Storybook documents Chromatic as a cloud option for cross-browser visual testing and review. Choose this layer when screenshot differences and team review are valuable enough to justify reviewing diffs and maintaining baselines. Details are in the visual testing guide.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Run checks in CI and share the catalog
Once the stories and checks are useful locally, run the selected checks in the project’s CI pipeline so changes can be checked repeatably. Storybook provides a GitHub Actions example with checkout, Node setup, dependency installation, and a Storybook test command. Treat action and container versions in examples as examples: verify them against current requirements when implementing the workflow.
Publish or share Storybook when teammates or stakeholders need to inspect the implementation, states, or behavior. A shared catalog makes review possible without requiring every reviewer to reconstruct those states in the full application.
Or skip the browser setup:
If your goal is to capture a page screenshot rather than build an isolated component workflow, ScreenshotNeo provides a website screenshot API and MCP server. Its one-request example is:
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curl -G "https://api.screenshotneo.com/v1/shot" -d access_key=YOUR_API_KEY --data-urlencode url=https://stripe.com -o shot.webpSee the ScreenshotNeo API documentation for request options. Cookie banners, popups, and chat widgets are removed before the shot; bot checks, blank pages, and failed loads are never billed. Its MCP server lets AI agents take screenshots, and the free plan includes 1,000 screenshots a month with no card; paid plans start at $5 for 3,000. Sign up for free.
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