Element uses BEM-styled CSS so that you can override styles easily. But if you need to replace styles at a large scale, e.g. change the theme color from blue to orange or green, maybe overriding them one by one is not a good idea, and this is where our theme customization tools kick in.
### Changing theme color
Under construction.
### More customizations
If you need more customization than just changing the theme color, please follow these steps:
#### <strong>Install related tool</strong>
First install the theme generator globally or locally. Local install is recommended because in this way, when others clone your project, npm will automatically install it for them.
```shell
npm i element-theme -g
```
Then install the chalk theme from npm or GitHub.
```shell
# from npm
npm i element-theme-chalk -D
# from GitHub
npm i https://github.com/ElementUI/theme-chalk -D
```
#### <strong>Initialize variable file</strong>
After successfully installing the above packages, a command named `et` is available in CLI (if the packages are installed locally, use `node_modules/.bin/et` instead). Run `-i` to initialize the variable file which outputs to `element-variables.scss` by default. And you can specify its output directory as you will.
```shell
et -i[custom output file]
> ✔ Generator variables file
```
In `element-variables.scss` you can find all the variables we used to style Element and they are defined in SCSS format:
Just edit `element-variables.scss`, e.g. changing the theme color to red:
```CSS
$--color-primary: red;
```
#### <strong>Build theme</strong>
After saving the variable file, use `et` to build your theme. You can activate `watch` mode by adding a parameter `-w`. And if you customized the variable file's output, you need to add a parameter `-c` and variable file's name:
```shell
et
> ✔ build theme font
> ✔ build element theme
```
#### <strong>Import custom theme</strong>
By default the build theme file is placed inside `./theme`. You can specify its output directory with parameter `-o`. Importing your own theme is just like importing the default theme, only this time you import the file you just built:
```javascript
import'../theme/index.css'
importElementUIfrom'element-ui'
importVuefrom'vue'
Vue.use(ElementUI)
```
#### <strong>Import component theme on demand</strong>
If you are using `babel-plugin-component` for on-demand import, just modify `.babelrc` and specify `styleLibraryName` to the path where your custom theme is located relative to `.babelrc`. Note that `~` is required:
```json
{
"plugins":[["component",[
{
"libraryName":"element-ui",
"styleLibraryName":"~theme"
}
]]]
}
```
If you are unfamiliar with `babel-plugin-component`, please refer to <ahref="./#/en-US/component/quickstart">Quick Start</a>. For more details, check out the [project repository](https://github.com/ElementUI/element-theme) of `element-theme`.
