Integrating CKEditor 5 with React from CDN

CKEditor 5 has an official React integration that you can use to add a rich text editor to your application. This guide will help you install it and configure to use the CDN distribution of the CKEditor 5.

Quick start

This guide assumes that you already have a React project. If you do not have one, see the React documentation to learn how to create it.

Note

To use our Cloud CDN services, create a free account. Learn more about license key activation.

Start by installing the React integration for CKEditor 5 from npm:

npm install @ckeditor/ckeditor5-react

Once the integration is installed, create a new React component called Editor.jsx. It will use the useCKEditorCloud helper to load the editor code from the CDN and the <CKEditor> component to run it, both of which come from the above package. The following example shows a component with open source and premium CKEditor 5 plugins.

import React from 'react';
import { CKEditor, useCKEditorCloud } from '@ckeditor/ckeditor5-react';

const CKEditorDemo = () => {
    const cloud = useCKEditorCloud( {
        version: '47.1.0',
        premium: true
    } );

    if ( cloud.status === 'error' ) {
        return <div>Error!</div>;
    }

    if ( cloud.status === 'loading' ) {
        return <div>Loading...</div>;
    }

    const {
        ClassicEditor,
        Essentials,
        Paragraph,
        Bold,
        Italic
    } = cloud.CKEditor;

    const { FormatPainter } = cloud.CKEditorPremiumFeatures;

    return (
        <CKEditor
            editor={ ClassicEditor }
            data={ '<p>Hello world!</p>' }
            config={ {
                licenseKey: '<YOUR_LICENSE_KEY>',
                plugins: [ Essentials, Paragraph, Bold, Italic, FormatPainter ],
                toolbar: [ 'undo', 'redo', '|', 'bold', 'italic', '|', 'formatPainter' ]
            } }
        />
    );
};

In the above example, the useCKEditorCloud helper is used to load the editor code and plugins from CDN. The premium option is set to also load premium plugins. For more information about the useCKEditorCloud helper, see the Loading CDN resources guide.

Component properties

The <CKEditor> component supports the following properties:

editor (required) – The Editor constructor to use.
data – The initial data for the created editor. See the Getting and setting data guide.
config – The editor configuration. See the Configuration guide.
id – The editor ID. When this property changes, the component restarts the editor with new data instead of setting it on an initialized editor.
disabled – A Boolean value. The editor is being switched to read-only mode if the property is set to true.
disableWatchdog – A Boolean value. If set to true, the watchdog feature will be disabled. It is set to false by default.
watchdogConfig – Configuration object for the watchdog feature.
onReady – A function called when the editor is ready with an editor instance. This callback is also called after the reinitialization of the component if an error occurred.
onAfterDestroy – A function called after the successful destruction of an editor instance rendered by the component. This callback is also triggered after the editor has been reinitialized after an error. The component is not guaranteed to be mounted when this function is called.
onChange – A function called when the editor data has changed. See the editor.model.document#change:data event.
onBlur – A function called when the editor was blurred. See the editor.editing.view.document#blur event.
onFocus – A function called when the editor was focused. See the editor.editing.view.document#focus event.
onError – A function called when the editor has crashed during the initialization or during the runtime. It receives two arguments: the error instance and the error details. Error details is an object that contains two properties:
phase: 'initialization'|'runtime' – Informs when the error has occurred (during or after the editor/context initialization).
willEditorRestart – When true, it means the editor component will restart itself.

The editor event callbacks (onChange, onBlur, onFocus) receive two arguments:

An EventInfo object.
An Editor instance.

Context feature

The @ckeditor/ckeditor5-react package provides a ready-to-use component for the context feature that is useful to use with some CKEditor 5 collaboration features.

import React from 'react';
import { CKEditor, CKEditorContext, useCKEditorCloud } from '@ckeditor/ckeditor5-react';

export const CKEditorCloudContextDemo = () => {
    const cloud = useCKEditorCloud( {
        version: '47.1.0'
    } );

    if ( cloud.status === 'error' ) {
        return <div>Error!</div>;
    }

    if ( cloud.status === 'loading' ) {
        return <div>Loading...</div>;
    }

    const { ClassicEditor } = cloud.CKEditor;

    return (
        <CKEditorContext
            context={ ClassicEditor.Context }
            contextWatchdog={ ClassicEditor.ContextWatchdog }
            onChangeInitializedEditors={ editors => {
                console.log( 'Initialized editors:', editors );
            } }
        >
            <CKEditorNestedInstanceDemo
                name='editor1'
                content='<p>Editor 1</p>'
            />

            <br />

            <CKEditorNestedInstanceDemo
                name='editor2'
                content='<p>Editor 2</p>'
            />
        </CKEditorContext>
    );
};

function CKEditorNestedInstanceDemo( { name, content } ) {
    const cloud = useCKEditorCloud( {
        version: '47.1.0',
        premium: true
    } );

    if ( cloud.status === 'error' ) {
        console.error( cloud );
        return <div>Error!</div>;
    }

    if ( cloud.status === 'loading' ) {
        return <div>Loading...</div>;
    }

    const {
        ClassicEditor,
        Essentials,
        Paragraph,
        Bold,
        Italic,
        Mention
    } = cloud.CKEditor;

    return (
        <CKEditor
            contextItemMetadata={ {
                name
            } }
            editor={ ClassicEditor }
            data={ content }
            config={ {
                plugins: [
                    Essentials,
                    Paragraph,
                    Bold,
                    Italic,
                    Mention
                ],
                toolbar: {
                    items: [ 'undo', 'redo', '|', 'bold', 'italic' ],
                }
            } }
        />
    );
}

The CKEditorContext component supports the following properties:

context (required) – The CKEditor 5 context class.
contextWatchdog (required) – The Watchdog context class.
config – The CKEditor 5 context configuration.
isLayoutReady – A property that delays the context creation when set to false. It creates the context and the editor children once it is true or unset. Useful when the CKEditor 5 annotations or a presence list are used.
id – The context ID. When this property changes, the component restarts the context with its editor and reinitializes it based on the current configuration.
onChangeInitializedEditors – A function called when any editor is initialized or destroyed in the tree. It receives a dictionary of fully initialized editors, where the key is the value of the contextItemMetadata.name property set on the CKEditor component. The editor’s ID is the key if the contextItemMetadata property is absent. Additional data can be added to the contextItemMetadata in the CKEditor component, which will be passed to the onChangeInitializedEditors function.
onReady – A function called when the context is ready and all editors inside were initialized with the context instance. This callback is also called after the reinitialization of the component if an error has occurred.
onError – A function called when the context has crashed during the initialization or during the runtime. It receives two arguments: the error instance and the error details. Error details is an object that contains two properties:
phase: 'initialization'|'runtime' – Informs when the error has occurred (during or after the editor/context initialization).
willContextRestart – When true, it means that the context component will restart itself.

Note

An example build that exposes both context and classic editor can be found in the CKEditor 5 collaboration sample.

How to?

Using the document editor type

If you use the document (decoupled) editor, you need to add the toolbar to the DOM manually:

import { useEffect, useRef, useState } from 'react';
import { CKEditor } from '@ckeditor/ckeditor5-react';

function App() {
    const cloud = useCKEditorCloud( {
        version: '47.1.0'
    } );

    const editorToolbarRef = useRef( null );
    const [ isMounted, setMounted ] = useState( false );

    useEffect( () => {
        setMounted( true );

        return () => {
            setMounted( false );
        };
    }, [] );

    if ( cloud.status === 'error' ) {
        console.error( cloud );
        return <div>Error!</div>;
    }

    if ( cloud.status === 'loading' ) {
        return <div>Loading...</div>;
    }

    const { DecoupledEditor, Essentials, Paragraph, Bold, Italic } = cloud.CKEditor;

    return (
        <div>
            <div ref={ editorToolbarRef }></div>
            <div>
                { isMounted && (
                    <CKEditor
                        editor={ DecoupledEditor }
                        data='<p>Hello from CKEditor 5 decoupled editor!</p>'
                        config={ {
                            plugins: [ Essentials, Paragraph, Bold, Italic ],
                            toolbar: [ 'undo', 'redo', '|', 'bold', 'italic' ]
                        } }
                        onReady={ ( editor ) => {
                            if ( editorToolbarRef.current ) {
                                editorToolbarRef.current.appendChild( editor.ui.view.toolbar.element );
                            }
                        }}
                        onAfterDestroy={ ( editor ) => {
                            if ( editorToolbarRef.current ) {
                                Array.from( editorToolbarRef.current.children ).forEach( child => child.remove() );
                            }
                        } }
                    />
                ) }
            </div>
        </div>
    );
}

export default App;

Using the editor with collaboration plugins

We provide a few ready-to-use integrations featuring collaborative editing in React applications:

It is not mandatory to build applications on top of the above samples, however, they should help you get started.

Localization

CKEditor 5 supports multiple UI languages, and so does the official React component. To translate the editor, pass the languages you need into the translations array inside the configuration of the useCKEditorCloud hook.

import React from 'react';
import { CKEditor, useCKEditorCloud } from '@ckeditor/ckeditor5-react';

const CKEditorDemo = () => {
    const cloud = useCKEditorCloud( {
        version: '47.1.0',
        translations: [ 'es' ]
    } );

    if ( cloud.status === 'error' ) {
        return <div>Error!</div>;
    }

    if ( cloud.status === 'loading' ) {
        return <div>Loading...</div>;
    }

    const {
        ClassicEditor,
        Essentials,
        Bold,
        Italic,
        Paragraph
    } = cloud.CKEditor;

    return (
        <CKEditor
            editor={ ClassicEditor }
            data={ '<p>Hello world!</p>' }
            config={ {
                licenseKey: '<YOUR_LICENSE_KEY>',
                toolbar: [ 'undo', 'redo', '|', 'bold', 'italic' ],
                plugins: [ Bold, Essentials, Italic, Paragraph ],
            } }
        />
    );
};

For more information, please refer to the Setting the UI language guide.

TypeScript support

The official React integration for CKEditor 5 is written in TypeScript and fully supports it. If you use TypeScript in your project, you can use the CKEditor component without additional configuration. However, if you want to use some specific types from the CKEditor 5 packages, you can import them directly from a special package containing type definitions. Take a look at the following example:

import React from 'react';
import { CKEditor, useCKEditorCloud } from '@ckeditor/ckeditor5-react';

import type { EventInfo } from 'https://cdn.ckeditor.com/typings/ckeditor5.d.ts';

const CKEditorDemo = () => {
    const cloud = useCKEditorCloud( {
        version: '47.1.0',
        translations: [ 'es' ]
    } );

    if ( cloud.status === 'error' ) {
        return <div>Error!</div>;
    }

    if ( cloud.status === 'loading' ) {
        return <div>Loading...</div>;
    }

    const {
        ClassicEditor,
        Essentials,
        Bold,
        Italic,
        Paragraph
    } = cloud.CKEditor;

    return (
        <CKEditor
            editor={ ClassicEditor }
            data={ '<p>Hello world!</p>' }
            config={ {
                licenseKey: '<YOUR_LICENSE_KEY>',
                toolbar: [ 'undo', 'redo', '|', 'bold', 'italic' ],
                plugins: [ Bold, Essentials, Italic, Paragraph ],
            } }
            onBlur={ ( event: EventInfo ) => {
                // your event handler
            } }
        />
    );
};

In the example above, the EventInfo type is imported from the https://cdn.ckeditor.com/typings/ckeditor5.d.ts package, while the editor itself loads from the CDN. Note that https://cdn.ckeditor.com/typings/ckeditor5.d.ts is not an actual URL to the CKEditor 5 typings file but a synthetic TypeScript module providing typings for the editor. The ckeditor5 package supplies the actual types, which depend on the @ckeditor/ckeditor5-react package.

Although this setup might seem complex, it prevents users from directly importing anything from the ckeditor5 package, which could lead to duplicated code issues.

Type definitions for premium features

If you want to use types for premium features, you can import them similarly to the base editor types. Remember that you need to install the ckeditor5-premium-features package to use them. You can do it by running the following command:

npm install --save-dev ckeditor5-premium-features

After installing the package, you can import the types in the following way:

<script setup>
// ...
import type { Mention } from 'https://cdn.ckeditor.com/typings/ckeditor5-premium-features.d.ts';
// ...
</script>

Known issues

While type definitions for the base editor should be available out of the box, some bundlers do not install the ckeditor5 package, which provides typing for the editor. If you encounter any issues with the type definitions, you can install the ckeditor5 package manually:

npm install --save-dev ckeditor5

Contributing and reporting issues

The source code of rich text editor component for React is available on GitHub in https://github.com/ckeditor/ckeditor5-react.

Next steps

See how to manipulate the editor’s data in the Getting and setting data guide.
Refer to further guides in the setup section to see how to customize your editor further.
Check the features category to learn more about individual features.