Carbon Design System
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React tutorial

Last updated Jun 30, 2026

Learn more about building a React application with Carbon and Next.js. This tutorial covers installing components, building pages, connecting APIs, creating custom components, and deploying your app to production.

React tutorial

Overview

Starting from a base Create Next App, let’s install Carbon and begin using Carbon components. By the end you will have a Next.js app that uses the UI Shell to navigate between pages.

Fork, clone and branch

This tutorial has an accompanying GitHub repository called carbon-tutorial-nextjs that we’ll use as a starting point for each step.

Fork

To begin, fork carbon-tutorial-nextjs using your GitHub account. Please note when forking you must uncheck “Copy the main branch only” so you can access all branches / steps of the tutorial.

Clone

Go to your forked repository, copy the SSH or HTTPS URL and in your terminal run the two commands to get the repository in your local file system and enter that directory.

Add upstream remote

Add a remote called upstream so we can eventually submit a pull request once you have completed this tutorial step. There are two choices: SSH or HTTPS

Verify that your forked repository remotes are correct:

Your terminal should output something like this:

Branch

Now that we have our repository set up, let’s check out the branch for this tutorial step’s starting point. Run the two commands:

Build and start

We have the repository forked to your GitHub account, cloned down to your machine, and the starting branch checked out. Next, install the Next.js app’s dependencies with:

After the dependencies are installed, create a build with:

After the build and dependencies are installed, you can start the app with:

This is a Next.js 13 app with a home page, its root layout and a global style sheet.

Your default browser should open up with an empty page that says: Hello Carbon! Well, not quite yet. This is the starting point for the Carbon React tutorial.

Install Carbon

Even though we installed existing dependencies, we’ve yet to install our v11 Carbon package, @carbon/react, which contains everything you need to build with.

Stop your development server with CTRL-C and install Carbon dependencies with:

Install and build Sass

We need to run a Sass build as the Carbon styles are authored in Sass, so run the following command to install sass as a dependency.

Then, start the app again. If your app’s currently running, you’ll need to restart it for the new environment variable to be used.

The app looks as it did before. Next, let’s prepare our app for a Sass build.

In src directory, rename globals.css as globals.scss and change the import in layout.js from global.css to globals.scss.

Import carbon-component styles

In globals.scss, import the Carbon styles by adding the following at the top of the file:

In Next.js 13 there is a global style sheet and then every page has it own, optional, style sheet.

Next, we’ll import a Button from Carbon to test that our dependencies are working properly. At the top of page.js, import the Button by adding the following:

We need use client since the Carbon components we use are all client components. In Next 13 pages are pulled in as children to layout files (see RootLayout src/app/layout.js) and these are always server side components.

In the Page component return, you can now replace:

with

Congratulations, you’ve imported your first component! You should see a Carbon styled button on the page.

Add UI Shell

Next, we’re going to create a React component called TutorialHeader to use with the UI Shell Carbon component. In the src directory, create a components directory and inside of that, a TutorialHeader directory. Create the following files inside src/components/TutorialHeader:

Add UI Shell Sass

Next, in globals.scss, we’ll import our TutorialHeader styles. Add this line to the top of the file:

Import and export the header

Next we’ll import our Carbon UI Shell components into TutorialHeader.js. Set up the file like so:

Note: you can find a description of the different components used in the UI Shell in our @carbon/react package.

Note: When creating navigation headers, it’s important to have a Skip to content link so keyboard users can skip the navigation items and go straight to the main content.

Import icons

First we will install the icons we will use in the header

Now let’s import the icons. In the TutorialHeader.js file, we need to import each individual icon we will use.

Then we need to add the HeaderGlobalAction component inside of the HeaderGlobalBar where we will add our icons. These represent actions in the header a user can make. Replace:

With:

Render the header

Next we’ll render our UI Shell by importing our TutorialHeader component and Content into a provider components in the Root Layout. We do this because layout components in Next.js 13 are server-side components.

Note: We can wrap the {children} in Root Layout with a Provider component that will use to hold the components we want across all pages. See this explanation in Next docs.

Create a providers.js file within the app folder with the following content.

You should now see a styled UI Shell header and a button below it.

Create pages

Next thing we need to do is create the files for our content. We already have a folder called app in src. This should be a sibling of src/components.

Since our app will have two pages, we’ll create two folders in src/app.

Next.js uses these folders for page routing which is built into the framework, we do not need separate React routing. In each there is a page.js and optionally a layout.js and styling sheet.

Create the following files in the home folder:

Create the following files in the repos folder:

Set up content Sass

Next, we’ll import our content Sass files in globals.scss, like so:

Import and export content pages

Now that our stylesheets are set up, we need to create our pages’ components. Starting with LandingPage, just like with our header, we need to export the component in javascript path=src/app/home/page.js by adding:

And we will add this into our root page:

We’ll repeat this process with RepoPage.

Navigate to the repos page by adding /repos at the end of your locally hosted site to see your repos page.

Awesome! We’ve just created our content pages with automatic page routing courtesy of Next.js.

After that we need to do a couple of quick fixes to the UI Shell to work with Next.js links.

Add the Link import in TutorialHeader.js:

We need to use the Link component instead of the default anchor elements to prevent full page reload when navigating to different pages in Next.js applications. To use Link, we wrap HeaderName component and pass through href elements to it:

Do the same with the components HeaderNavigation and HeaderSideNavItems that contain href="/repos", updating them to:

and the following:

You should now have a working header that routes to different pages without full page reload! However, our page does not match the design specs. We need to change the header theme to g100 to match the specs.

In providers.js we will add inline theming for our navigation. First, we need to import our new Theme component.

Then, we will wrap Theme around our header, and set the zoned theme using the theme prop, which accepts one of four strings: "white", "g10", "g90" or "g100".

We have one last thing to fix before we’re done. Because we changed the header theme to dark, the <HeaderGlobalAction> tooltips are now light instead of dark, and when you scroll the page, it blends into the content. To fix this, we’ll add some overriding styles in _tutorial-header.scss:

Submit pull request

We’re going to submit a pull request to verify completion of this tutorial step and demonstrate a couple of related concepts.

Continuous integration (CI) check

We have a ci-check script defined in package.json that verifies file formatting for files that have been touched since the last Git commit with a tool called Prettier. You’d typically also have that script run your test suite as part of your CI build. Go ahead and make sure everything looks good with:

Note: If the ci-check is giving an error, it’s likely that some of your source files are not properly formatted. This could happen if your text editor isn’t formatting with Prettier on save. To get ci-check to pass, run yarn format then re-run yarn ci-check.

Git commit and push

Before we can create a pull request, stage and commit all of your changes:

Note: You’ll notice that your commit includes binaries in the .yarn/cache folder. That’s expected as the repository is configured to run Yarn offline for more reliable builds. Future tutorial steps that don’t install new packages won’t have .yarn/cache commit changes.

Then, push to your repository:

Note: If your Git remote protocol is HTTPS instead of SSH, you may be prompted to authenticate with GitHub when you push changes. If your GitHub account has two-factor authentication enabled, we recommend that you follow these instructions to create a personal access token for the command line. That lets you use your token instead of password when performing Git operations over HTTPS.

Note: If you receive a non-fast-forward error, it’s likely that your forked repository is behind the original repository and needs to be updated. This can happen if the tutorial was updated after you began working on it. To fix, run git pull upstream v11-next-step-1 to merge the changes into your branch, then you can try pushing again. Or, you can manually merge in the upstream changes.

Pull request (PR)

Finally, visit carbon-react-tutorial to “Compare & pull request”. In doing so, make sure that you are comparing to v11-next-step-1 into base: v11-next-step-1. Take notice of the Netlify bot that deploys a preview of your PR every time that you push new commits. These previews can be shared and viewed by anybody to assist the PR review process.

Note: Expect your tutorial step PRs to be reviewed by the Carbon team but not merged. We’ll close your PR so we can keep the repository’s remote branches pristine and ready for the next person!

Note: If your PR fails the CircleCI test with the error Can't make a request in offline mode, try running the following command: rm -rf .yarn-offline-mirror node_modules && yarn cache clean && yarn install. Add and commit the changes once this completes, and try pushing again.