TypeScript and React: Prop Types

React has its own, built-in way of type checking called “prop types”. Together with TypeScript this provides a full, end-to-end type-checking experience: Compiler and run-time.

In this section:

• Installing Prop Types
• Inferring Prop Types
• Combined with defaultProps
• Children
• Further reading

Installing Prop Types #

To get going with prop types you have to install two packages:

npm install --save prop-types
npm install --save-dev @types/prop-types

Once everything is installed, you can start adding prop types by adding a field called propTypes to your components:

import React from "react";
import PropTypes from "prop-types";

export function Article ({ title, price })  {
  return (
    <div className="article">
      <h1>{title}</h1>
      <span>Priced at (incl VAT): {price * 1.2}</span>
    </div>
  );
}

Article.propTypes = {
  title: PropTypes.string.isRequired,
  price: PropTypes.number.isRequired,
};

This is already enough to get IDE feedback when using the component:

const book = <Article title="TypeScript and React" price={10} /> // ✅
const video = <Article title="TypeScript Videos" price="1000" /> // 💥 - Type Error

Check out my Codesandbox for a live example.

Inferring Prop Types #

This means we get a ton of type safety for free, without adding any TypeScript functionality. There’s one downside however: The props inside the component are still of type any. So while you get type safety when using the components, you don’t get any when writing. Thankfully, the prop-types types package gives you some handy tools. All you need is the InferProps generic:

import PropTypes, { InferProps } from "prop-types";

export function Article({
  title,
  price
}: InferProps<typeof Article.propTypes>) {
  return (
    <div className="article">
      <h1>{title}</h1>
      <span>Priced at (incl VAT): {price * 1.2}</span>
    </div>
  );
}

Article.propTypes = {
  title: PropTypes.string.isRequired,
  price: PropTypes.number.isRequired
};

Compiles just right, and gives you all the insights inside your component.

Combined with defaultProps #

We were talking about defaultProps in the components chapter. You can combine defaultProps and propTypes. E.g. when you set a prop type to isRequired, but add a defaultProp for it, TypeScript understands that this becomes optional.

Article.propTypes = {
  title: PropTypes.string.isRequired,
  price: PropTypes.number.isRequired
};

Article.defaultProps = {
  price: 20
};

Nice!

Children #

Compared to other ways of defining components like the FunctionComponent type, InferProps only deals with properties, not with the component itself. This also means that we have to explicitly provide information for children:

export function ArticleList({
  children
}: InferProps<typeof ArticleList.propTypes>) {
  return <div className="list">{children}</div>;
}

ArticleList.propTypes = {
  children: PropTypes.oneOfType([
    PropTypes.arrayOf(PropTypes.node),
    PropTypes.node
  ]).isRequired
};

This should be sufficient.

Further reading #

For insights into prop types, check out the official documentation.

If you want to dig deeper into how this works, check out Ali’s excellent article on that topic over at dev.to.