Send your first message

Sendbird UIKit for React is a set of prebuilt UI components that allows you to easily craft an in-app chat with all the essential messaging features. Our development kit includes light and dark themes, fonts, colors and more. You can customize these components to create an interactive messaging interface unique to your brand identity.

Sendbird UIKit supports both open channels and group channels. Follow the guide below to start sending a message from scratch with React. This library isn't designed to work with other frameworks such as Vue or Angular.

Note: While group channels provide a ChannelList component, open channels do not. You have to create your own list of open channels.

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The dependencies for UIKit for React are:

• React 16.8.0 or higher
• React DOM 16.8.0 or higher
• Sendbird Chat SDK for JavaScript 3.1.0 or higher
• css-vars-ponyfill 2.3.2
• date-fns 2.16.1

Note: From v1.3.0, UIKit doesn't support moment.

Before installing Sendbird Chat SDK, you need to create a Sendbird application on the Sendbird Dashboard, which comprises everything required in a chat service including users, messages, and channels. You will need the App ID of your Sendbird application when initializing the Chat SDK.

Note: Each Sendbird application can be integrated with a single client app. Within the same application, users can communicate with each other across all platforms, whether they are on mobile devices or on the web.

You can start building a modern messaging experience in your app by first installing Sendbird UIKit. This developer kit is an add-on feature to Sendbird Chat SDK so installing it will also install the core Chat SDK.

You can install UIKit for React through npm. Enter the following code on the command line with npm. The minimum requirements listed above must be installed on your system to use npm.

npm i @sendbird/uikit-react

When using yarn, enter the following command.

yarn add @sendbird/uikit-react

If you're working in a TypeScript project, add the following line to tsconfig.include:

node_modules/@sendbird/uikit-react/index.d.ts

An example of a tsconfig file should look like the following:

{
    "compilerOptions": {
        "target": "es5",
        "lib": [
            "dom",
            "dom.iterable",
            "esnext"
        ],
        "esModuleInterop": true,
        "jsx": "react-jsx",
    },
    "include": [
        "src",
        "node_modules/@sendbird/uikit-react/index.d.ts"
    ]
}

Next, import UIKit components to your app.

import SendbirdProvider from "@sendbird/uikit-react/SendbirdProvider";
import withSendbird from "@sendbird/uikit-react/withSendbird";

Once you're done installing Sendbird UIKit, you can now implement it to your web app by using the App component. The App component is a group of essential UI components needed to build a functioning chat interface. You can also use our core components to your web app if you wish to make the interface more tailored to your needs.

Add the following pattern to use the App component:

import SendBirdApp from "@sendbird/uikit-react/App";

const App = () => {
    return (
        <div className="App">
            <SendBirdApp
                // Add the two lines below.
                appId={YOUR_APP_ID};    // Specify your Sendbird application ID.
                userId={USER_ID};    // Specify your user ID.
            />
        </div>
    );
};

Specify the dimensions of your chat interface.

.App {
    Font-family: sans-serif;
    Text-align: center;
    height: 100vh;   // Add this line.
    width: 100vw;   // Add this line.
}

You can now run the app to send a message. First, create a group channel by clicking on the icon in the top-left corner. Then, you can select users you wish to invite as members to your channel. Once the channel has been created, enter your first message and send.

You've successfully sent your first message with Sendbird.

You can use UIKit with SSR frameworks such as Gatsby or NextJS by importing it dynamically on the client side. These frameworks support the following plug-in and workflow:

• Loadable components of Gatsby
• Dynamic imports of NextJS

You may refer to NextJS' sample for better understanding. You will need your own Sendbird application ID and user ID to use the sample.

The App component is a collection of all UIKit components needed to quickly implement a basic chat, and only requires the app ID and user ID to be configured.

// Create a chat application.
import SendBirdApp from "@sendbird/uikit-react/App";

const MyApp = () => {
    <Route id={'/chat'}>
        <App
            appId={appId}
            userId={userId}
            nickname={nickname}
            profileUrl={profileUrl}
            accessToken={accessToken}
            theme={theme}
            userListQuery={userListQuery}
        />
    </div>
}