Can you use normal CSS with React? - reactjs

Question

I'm using create-react-app and have read bad things about inline styles so I wanted to use css modules however they aren't supported by create-react-app at this time. Can I literally just use plain old css in one big file? Also with this approach how do I style a react component. For example I have a component and I give it a class name: <card className="cardStyle" />. Why does this not work? I want to bed able to position it just like I would a div.

Answer 1

it's certainly possible, you may have plain old CSS classes in a style.css somewhere, but you'll have to make sure your app includes it,
e.g. have in your App.js
import './style.css'

Answer 2

The standard way is to do the following;
import React, { Component } from 'react';
import './Button.css'; // Tell Webpack that Button.js uses these styles
class Button extends Component {
render() {
// You can use them as regular CSS styles
return <div className="Button" />;
}
}
See: https://github.com/facebookincubator/create-react-app/blob/master/packages/react-scripts/template/README.md#adding-a-stylesheet

Answer 3

Using CSS Modules might be better way:
CSS Modules have .module.css in their file name, like styles.module.css. Naming it so is important it avoids serious issue in plain CSS when having same CSS class names in different CSS files.
File : styles.module.css
.myClass1 {
background-color: red;
}
File : App.js
import styles from'./styles.module.css';
<div className={styles['myClass1']} >
some content
</div>
By default supported by Create React App - https://reactjs.org/docs/create-a-new-react-app.html
This can done using simple steps
npx create-react-app my-app
cd my-app
npm start
Links:
. https://create-react-app.dev/docs/adding-a-css-modules-stylesheet/
. https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-style-react-apps-with-css/
If you want to use normal css but want more flexibilities like props to css, and open to install more dependencies then alternatives are:
. https://emotion.sh/docs/introduction
. https://styled-components.com/
Some are migrating styled-components to emotion, so may be emotion is better way to start with.
See https://storybook.js.org/blog/541-components-from-styled-components-to-emotion/