Distribution and consumption

When creating design systems or component systems, we recommend that you maintain a centralized distribution structure in a single export package with multiple import paths, example:

import { Button, Input } from "my-ds";

import { Button } from "my-ds/button";
import { Input } from "my-ds/input";

What are the benefits of this type of distribution?

Aesthetic coherence, the entire design system leverages itself and thanks to this we gain aesthetic coherence.

While a monorepo might seem like an ideal path, it actually increases the complexity of maintenance, whether it be component versioning and dependency maintenance.

We move faster and reduce implementation errors if you don't rely on individual versioning at the component level and leave this only defined at the design system level.

This has its pros and cons:

Pros:

1. It speeds up the creation of components, since it avoids the individual publication process and centralizes all this at the design system level.

Cons

1. you will not be able to update a component individually, since it is leveraged at the design system level.

Recommended file structure for webcomponents

you always prefer to keep each component isolated in a directory with names associative to the same component, example:

├── my-button
│   ├── my-button.{js,jsx,ts,tsx}
│   ├── my-button.test.{js,jsx,ts,tsx}
│   ├── my-button.stories.js
│   └── my-button.md
└── my-input
    ├── my-input.{js,jsx,ts,tsx}
    ├── my-input.test.{js,jsx,ts,tsx}
    ├── my-input.stories.js
    └── my-input.md

why? The NPM-oriented @atomico/exports packaging tool allows automatic export from the recommended structure,@atomico/exports will generate a modern package.json to current standards, automatically generating all (main, types, exports and more) what is necessary for your package to be distributed correctly.

The following format is friendly when sharing a webcomponent to NPM using @atomico/exports

├── src
│   ├── define.{js,ts,jsx,tsx}
│   ├── elements.{js,ts,jsx,tsx}
│   ├── define.test.{js,ts,jsx,tsx}
│   └── slots
│       ├── my-sub-element-1.{js,jsx,ts,tsx}
│       └── my-sub-element-2.{js,jsx,ts,tsx}
├── README.md
├── index.html
├── .npmignore
├── package.json
└── tsconfig.json
    

From the previous structure we highlight:

1. src/define: import the components from src/elements and declare them as customElements

2. src/elements: groups and export components as CustomElements

Why separate the export of the element from the declaration?

since it improves the customElements definition experience, example:

import "my-component"; // internalmente define el customTag
import { MyElement } from "my-component/elements"; // no define el customTag

Thanks to @atomico/exports this is really easy, example:

exports src/{define,elements}.{ts,tsx} --exports --types

You can see a use case of this structure in @atomico/components