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Customize Theme

By default, all Chakra components inherit values from the default theme. In some scenarios, you might need to customize the default theme to match your design requirements, you have a few different options depending on your goals.

  • Customize the theme tokens like colors, font sizes, line heights, etc.
  • Customize the component styles, changing the base styles, sizes, or variants.
  • Customize the global styles.

Customizing theme tokens#

To extend or override a token in the default theme, import the extendTheme function and add the keys you'd like to override. You can also add new values to the theme.

For example, if you'd like to update the colors in the theme to include your brand colors, here's what you'll do:

If you're curious what theme styles you can override, please reference the default theme foundation style files.

Customizing component styles#

Chakra has a specific approach or API for styling components. The main idea is most components have default or base styles (baseStyle), styles for different sizes (sizes), and styles for different visual variants (variants).

It's important to understand this so you can override any component style effectively.

You're not limited to the component styles that Chakra providers, you can also create your custom component styles. Learn more.

Customizing single components#

As we mentioned earlier, a component style consists of baseStyles, sizes, variants and an optional defaultProps to denote the default size or variant.

Here's what the component style object looks like:

For example, let's override the component styles for Chakra's Button component.

And that's it! When you use the Button from Chakra, these updates will be automatically applied.

If you're curious what component styles you can override, please reference the default component style files.

Customizing global styles#

Global styles are theme-aware styles you can applied to any html element globally.

To add global styles, update the theme.styles.global key in the theme. Global styles can be a style object or a function that returns a style object.

Scaling out your project#

As your project grows in size, it's best to keep things organized. We highly suggest that instead of a single theme.js (or theme.ts) file, that you create a /theme folder in its place. Inside of this folder, you could have a directory structure that looks like such:

This way, you can structure your main theme entrypoint file to be much cleaner, like this:

None of this is strictly required to use Chakra - but we've learned some hard lessons on the "right" way and the "wrong" way to write styles. The above is our best suggestion on how to write style overrides and organize your custom theme.


In the next section, we'll show some examples of how to create custom component styles and use them in your components!

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