Get started with Motion for React

Motion for React is a React animation library for building smooth, production-grade UI animations. You can start with simple prop-based animations before growing to layout, gesture and scroll animations.

Motion's unique hybrid engine combines the performance of native browser animations with the flexibility of JavaScript.

It's also trusted by companies like Framer and Figma to power their amazing no-code animations and gestures.

In this guide, we'll learn how to install Motion and take a whirlwind tour of its main features.

Install

Motion is available via npm:

npm install motion

Features can now be imported via "motion/react":

import { motion } from "motion/react"

Note: Motion for React includes React-specific APIs. All vanilla Motion features are also available.

Your first animation

The <motion /> component is the core API in Motion for React. It's a normal DOM element, supercharged with animation capabilities.

<motion.ul animate={{ rotate: 360 }} />

When values in animate change, the component will animate. Motion has intuitive defaults, but animations can of course be configured via the transition prop.

<motion.div
  animate={{
    scale: 2,
    transition: { duration: 2 }
  }}
/>

Enter animation

When a component enters the page, it will automatically animate to the values defined in the animate prop.

You can provide values to animate from via the initial prop (otherwise these will be read from the DOM).

<motion.button initial={{ scale: 0 }} animate={{ scale: 1 }} />

Or disable this initial animation entirely by setting initial to false.

<motion.button initial={false} animate={{ scale: 1 }} />

Hover & tap animation

<motion /> extends React's event system with powerful gesture recognisers. It currently supports hover, tap, focus, and drag.

<motion.button
  whileHover={{ scale: 1.1 }}
  whileTap={{ scale: 0.95 }}
  onHoverStart={() => console.log('hover started!')}
/>

Motion's gestures are designed to feel better than using CSS or JavaScript events alone. Learn more about Motion's gestures.

Scroll animation

Motion supports both types of scroll animations: Scroll-triggered and scroll-linked.

To trigger an animation on scroll, the whileInView prop defines a state to animate to/from when an element enters/leaves the viewport:

<motion.div
  initial={{ backgroundColor: "rgb(0, 255, 0)", opacity: 0 }}
  whileInView={{ backgroundColor: "rgb(255, 0, 0)", opacity: 1 }}
/>

Whereas to link a value directly to scroll position, it's possible to use MotionValues via useScroll.

const { scrollYProgress } = useScroll()

return <motion.div style={{ scaleX: scrollYProgress }} />

Learn more about Motion's scroll animations.

Layout animation

Motion has an industry-leading layout animation engine that supports animating between changes in layout using transforms.

It's as easy as applying the layout prop.

<motion.div layout />

Or to animate between completely different elements, a layoutId:

<motion.div layoutId="underline" />

Learn more about layout animations.

Exit animations

By wrapping motion components with <AnimatePresence> we gain access to the exit prop. This allows us to animate elements as they're removed from the DOM.

<AnimatePresence>
  {show ? <motion.div key="box" exit={{ opacity: 0 }} /> : null}
</AnimatePresence>

Learn more about AnimatePresence.

Development tools

Motion provides developer tools to enhance your animation development experience, like loading your LLM with the latest Motion documentation, and visual bezier curve editors in VS Code.

Learn next

That's a very quick overview of Motion for React's basic features. But there's a lot more to learn!

Next, we recommend diving further into the the <motion /> component to learn more about its powerful features, like variants.

Or, you can dive straight in to our Fundamentals examples. Each comes complete with full source code that you can copy/paste into your project.