Lottie Animations for React

Who doesn't love animations? They're fun, engaging, and versatile. In this post, I will introduce Lottie animations and how to implement them into your React website.

What is a Lottie?

A Lottie is a JSON-based animation file format that enables designers to ship animations on any platform. They are small files that work on any device and can scale up or down without pixelation.

Integrating Lottie into React App

Step 1: install the library

npm install --save react-lottie

Step 2: select an animation from LottieFiles

You can download it as a JSON or use the Lottie Animation URL.
Personally, I prefer to download and store it in a folder in my application.
Here's an example of the file structure:

Step 3: create a Lottie.js file in src

The code inside that file should look like this:

import React from "react";
import Lottie from "react-lottie";

export default function LottieAnimation({ lotti, width, height }) {
  const defaultOptions = {
    loop: true,
    autoplay: true,
    animationData: lotti,
    rendererSettings: {
      preserveAspectRatio: "xMidYMid slice",
    },
  };

  return (
    <div>
      <Lottie options={defaultOptions} height={height} width={width} />
    </div>
  );
};

Step 4: import your Lottie into the component you want to return the animation:

import React from 'react';
import LottieAnimation from '../Lottie';
import home from '../Animation/dev.json';

const Example = () => {

    return ( 
         <div className='example'> 
           <LottieAnimation lotti={home} height={300} width={300} />
        </div>
    )
}

export default Example; 

Note: This example implies that you then add <Example /> into render in App.js

---

That's it! Your beautiful Lottie animation should now render to your site!

As always, feedback and discussion is welcome. 💁

Comments

[Danny Kim]

I've never heard of Lottie before, and it looks promising. To my understanding, Lottie is to GIF as SVG is to JPG.

[Hammed Oyedele]

Exactly but it gives you more than what this post discussed.

You can play, pause, forward, backward the animations just like videos.

[James Hubert]

Excellent. This is right up my alley. Thanks for posting.

[CiaraMaria]

Excite!

[James Hubert]

I ended up using this for an ecommerce frontend I'm building for a client's site!
dev.to/jwhubert91/project-31-of-10...

[CiaraMaria]

Yay! I love hearing that you were able to implement this! Thank you for the update.

[Hussein Kizz]

I was struggling through a lot of docs and this wasn't there, thanks so much I finally added lottie to my portfolio following your post!

[CiaraMaria]

That's awesome! Thank you!

[Teysworld]

This is awesome! I am new to React and loving these new discoveries

[Akshay.R.R]

is there any ways to play with interactivity of Lottie files in react? @proiacm . Please let me know if you have any solution for this, Thank you!

[Smile Gupta]

How to adjust the margin in react-Lottie?