Elastic UI Framework is a React component library that provides a collection of typed UI components and design utilities for building applications with Elastic's branding and aesthetics.
The framework solves the problem of maintaining consistent design standards across multiple products by centralizing UI components and styling logic in a single source of truth. It removes CSS from the component-building process by distributing pre-built React components alongside theme and style utilities that can be used independently. This approach allows designers to make changes to the aesthetic directly in code while providing unit test coverage that delivers a stable API for user interfaces.
The framework is primarily designed for use within Elastic's own products, though it is open source and available for external adoption subject to Elastic's licensing terms. It suits teams building React applications that need to adopt Elastic's design language and branding. The project welcomes community contributions, particularly for feature requests that the core team lacks bandwidth to implement, and maintains a wiki with documentation for creating and submitting new components. The framework uses semantic versioning and traditionally releases weekly, with API changes in prop names or component functionality treated as breaking changes while CSS selector or mixin renaming is not tracked with the same rigor.
Almost all open issues are raised by outside users rather than the core team, indicating a substantial base of adopters reporting real-world use. A first response to an issue or pull request typically takes one to two weeks. Work in the issue tracker is dominated by labels for stale issues, accessibility concerns, and low-hanging-fruit tasks.
