How to Create a Color Picker in React Native

React Native is a popular JavaScript library for creating mobile applications for both Android and iOS devices. One of the most useful components that you can use in React Native is a color picker. A color picker allows users to select a specific color from a range of colors. In this tutorial, we will show you how to create a color picker in React Native.

What is a Color Picker?

A color picker is a component that allows users to select a specific color from a range of colors. It is typically used in graphical user interfaces, such as in image editing software, to allow users to easily select a color. The color picker can also be used in web applications to allow users to select a color for a specific element, such as a background color for a page.

Creating the React Native App

Before we can create the color picker, we need to create a React Native app. To do this, we need to install the React Native command line interface (CLI). This can be done by running the following command:

npm install -g react-native-cli

Once the CLI is installed, we can create a new React Native app by running the following command:

react-native init MyApp

This will create a new React Native app with the name “MyApp”. We can then navigate to the app directory and run the following command to start the app:

cd MyApp
react-native run-android

This will start the app in the Android emulator.

Installing Dependencies

Before we can use the color picker in our React Native app, we need to install the necessary dependencies. The color picker we will be using is called react-native-color-picker. To install this package, we need to run the following command:

npm install react-native-color-picker --save

This will install the color picker package and save it as a dependency in our package.json file.

Using the Color Picker in React Native

Now that we have installed the necessary dependencies, we can start using the color picker in our React Native app. To do this, we need to import the color picker component from the package we just installed. We can do this by adding the following line to our code:

import { ColorPicker } from 'react-native-color-picker';

Once the component is imported, we can add it to our app. To do this, we need to add the following code to our render method:

render() {
  return (
    <View>
    <ColorPicker />
    </View>
  );
}

This will add the color picker to our app.

More Customizations

The color picker component has several options that can be used to customize its behavior. For example, we can set the initial color of the picker by passing the color as a prop to the component:

<ColorPicker
  color={'#ffffff'}
/>

We can also add a callback function that will be called when the user selects a color. This callback function will be passed the selected color as an argument:

<ColorPicker
  onColorSelected={(color) => {
    // Do something with the selected color
}}
/>

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we have shown you how to create a color picker in React Native. We started by creating a React Native app and installing the necessary dependencies. We then added the color picker component to our app and showed how to customize it. Finally, we added a callback function to handle when the user selects a color.

If you are looking to save a ton of implementation time, check out existing codebases, such as these fully fledged React Native templates.