How To Create A Carousel Component In Your React Application

For one of my projects, I recently learned how to create a carousel of images in a react application. Incorporating carousels into your application is a great way to make certain content stand out, keep your application looking organized, and also helps to give the site more interactivity.

In this blog post, I’ll walk you through how to set up a carousel of images in react using the react-responsive-carousel package.

Let’s get started!

Step 1: Create your functional component

Assuming that you’ve already created your react app, let’s begin by creating a basic functional component that will be responsible for rendering our carousel. For this example, I’ll create a functional component called “Otters” that will eventually display three images of otters in a carousel.

Step 2: Install the “react-responsive-carousel” Package

The next step is where the magic happens! The react-responsive-carousel package is a lightweight, powerful, and easily customizable package that allows you to create carousels in react applications.

To install, run npm i react-responsive-carousel in the terminal of your code editor.

Next, we’ll want to import the carousel as well as the css file from the react-responsive-carousel package.

The final piece of data that we’ll want to import are our images. If you have not already done so, go ahead and either create a folder for your images in your code editor or simply dropped into your src folder.

Your component should like the image below (with the exception of the images which should match your own)

Final Step: Set Up the Carousel

Now that you’ve successfully installed the package and imported the requisite lines of code in your component, your final step is to set up the carousel. There are many ways you can customize and render your carousel, so my recommendation is that you check out the documentation for the react-responsive-carousel package.

In this example, I’ll show you a quick way to get your carousel up and running.

Feel free to add whatever css styling you prefer and customize your carousel features by referencing the package documentation.

Don’t forget to import the component storing your carousel into your App.js file and calling it within the file so that it renders successfully in your application.

Voila, there you have it! I hope you found this walkthrough helpful and informative!

Resources:

• React-responsive-carousel package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-responsive-carousel