Congrats! You've installed React Native Elements and your immediate question goes something like this:

> So umm, how I do change how it looks?

Great question! A UI Kit wouldn't be that useful if the apps everyone built looked the same right? For this case React Native Elements provide a number of props on each component to enable you to style them how you want.

##
Component Styles

Every component from React Native Elements has a container around it. The container is just a traditional `<View />` from react native that has some styling on it. This default styling prevents components from colliding with each other. If you want to change how two components react to each on the screen your first stop should be the `containerStyle` prop.

Similar to `containerStyle`, components may provide their custom style props like `buttonStyle`, `titleStyle` etc. Always refer to the documentation for the component to find out which style props it provides.

##
Theming

While component styles are great for single use, you may want to have the same styling for every instance of a component. For example, you may want all your buttons to be blue or have the same font. Here are some ways to reuse styles with React Native Elements.

###
Using Composition

With this approach, we create one component with the styles we want and use that instead of the built-in component.

    import React from 'react';
    import { Button } from 'react-native-elements';

    const RaisedButton = props => <Button raised {...props} />;

    // Your App
    const App = () => {
      return <RaisedButton title="Yea" />;
    };

If we want to use a button that's raised in our app, we can use `RaisedButton` instead of using `Button`. This component still accepts all the props from the normal `Button` just that it has the `raised` prop set by default.

###
Using ThemeProvider

The previous solution works great for only one component, but imagine having to do this for every component you want custom styles for. That could get a bit tedious to manage. Thankfully, there's a better way to do this. React Native Elements ships with a 3 utilities for large-scale theming.

Firstly you'll want to set up your `ThemeProvider`.

    import { ThemeProvider, Button } from 'react-native-elements';

    const theme = {
      Button: {
        raised: true,
      },
    };

    // Your App
    const App = () => {
      return (
        <ThemeProvider theme={theme}>
          <Button title="My Button" />
          <Button title="My 2nd Button" />
        </ThemeProvider>
      );
    };

The example above acheives the same goals as the first example — apply the same styles to multiple instances of `Button` in the app. However this example applies the `raised` prop to every instance of `Button` inside the component tree under `ThemeProvider`. Both of these buttons will have the `raised` prop set to true.

This is extremely convenient and is made possible through React's Context API.

###
Order of Styles

What happens now if we want a `Button` that isn't raised? To do that we have to the understand the order in which styles are applied.

> Internal > Theme > External

####
Internal

Internal components styles are the styles which are defined in the component file. These are applied first.

####
Theme

Theme styles are the values that are set by the ThemeProvider If present, these are applied second.

    import { ThemeProvider, Button } from 'react-native-elements';

    const theme = {
      Button: {
        titleStyle: {
          color: 'red',
        },
      },
    };

    const App = () => {
      return (
        <ThemeProvider theme={theme}>
          <Button title="My Button" />
        </ThemeProvider>
      );
    };

This will override the white color for the title set in the component's style.

####
External

External styles are the styles which are set through the component props. These are applied last and have the highest precendence.

    import { ThemeProvider, Button } from 'react-native-elements';

    const theme = {
      Button: {
        titleStyle: {
          color: 'red',
        },
      },
    };

    const App = () => {
      return (
        <ThemeProvider theme={theme}>
          <Card title="My Button" titleStyle={{ color: 'pink' }} />
        </ThemeProvider>
      );
    };

This will override both the white color for the title set in the component's style as well as the red color set in the theme.

> Remember if you want to override the values set in the theme you can always use component props.

###
The Theme Object

By default, the theme object looks like this. You can add whatever values you want to the theme, and they will be merged with the default. By default the platform colors aren't used anywhere. These native colors are added for your convenience.

    interface theme {
      colors: {
        primary;
        secondary;
        grey0;
        grey1;
        grey2;
        grey3;
        grey4;
        grey5;
        greyOutline;
        searchBg;
        success;
        error;
        warning;
        divider;
        platform: {
          ios: {
            primary;
            secondary;
            success;
            error;
            warning;
          };
          android: {
            // Same as ios
          };
        };
      };
    }

Setting styles in the theme is as simple as using the name of the component, as a key and the props you want to change as the value.

    import { ThemeProvider } from 'react-native-elements';

    const theme = {
      Avatar: {
        rounded: true,
      },
      Badge: {
        textStyle: { fontSize: 30 },
      },
    };

    ...

    <ThemeProvider theme={theme}>

###
Using the theme in your own components

You may want to make use of the theming utilities in your own components. For this you can use the `withTheme` HOC exported from this library. It adds two props to the component it wraps - `theme` and `updateTheme`.

    import React from 'react';
    import { Text } from 'react-native';
    import { withTheme } from 'react-native-elements';

    function MyComponent(props) {
      const { theme, updateTheme } = props;
      return <Text style={{ color: theme.colors.primary }}>Yo!</Text>;
    }

    export default withTheme(MyComponent);

The `updateTheme` merges the theme passed in with the current theme.

    const theme = {
      colors: {
        primary: 'pink',
      },
    };

    // We can update the primary color
    updateTheme({ colors: { primary: 'red' } });

Don't want to wrap your components? You can use the `ThemeConsumer` component which uses render props!

    import React from 'react';
    import { Text } from 'react-native';
    import { ThemeConsumer } from 'react-native-elements';

    const MyComponent = () => (
      <ThemeConsumer>
        {({ theme }) => (
          <Text style={{ color: theme.colors.primary }}>Yo!</Text>;
        )}
      </ThemeConsumer>
    )

###
Using the respective platform's native colors

You may want to style your app using the native color palette. You can do this using the `colors` object and the `Platform` API.

    import { Platform } from 'react-native';
    import { Button, colors, ThemeProvider } from 'react-native-elements';

    const theme = {
      colors: {
        ...Platform.select({
          default: colors.platform.android,
          ios: colors.platform.ios,
        }),
      },
    };

    const App = () => {
      return (
        <ThemeProvider theme={theme}>
          // This button's color will now be the default iOS / Android blue.
          <Button title="My Button" />
        </ThemeProvider>
      );
    };

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