How to implement canvas in React

In React, developers can easily build engaging and interactive applications like games, data visualizations, and drawing tools by smoothly integrating the canvas element.

For this purpose, we use react-canvas-paint library, which enables developers to incorporate canvas into their React applications easily.

Installing dependencies

We'll need to install a few packages using npm, so make sure that your React application is built before we proceed.

You can see here how to create a React application.

Navigate to the root directory of your React project and install the dependencies using the following commands. We can name the folder as 'canvasReact' .

Rendering canvas in React

Let's see how react-canvas-paint helps to render canvas in your application.

• Lines 8–10: The component returns a div element that wraps the ReactCanvasPaint component, which is responsible for rendering the drawing canvas on the screen.

  • Line 9: ReactCanvasPaint is given two props, width and height, which controls the dimensions of the canvas. In this case, the width is set to 4000 pixels, and the height is set to 800 pixels.

When this component is rendered to the screen, it will display a large drawing canvas that users can interact with. The width and height of the canvas can be adjusted as needed to fit the application's requirements.

There are a few props of ReactCanvasPaint which are tabulated below.