Add dark mode to your site with this short CSS trick

#css #javascript #webdev

Most applications nowadays have dark mode: your command line, your IDE, your browser, etc. Why would your site be any different? Your website can also go dark when the visitor's browser has dark mode enabled. It's easier than you think. I'll show you how.

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
  body {
    background-color: black;
    color: #ccc;
  }
}

Hello darkness, my old friend.

This CSS snippet overrides styles for users' dark theme. The best thing is that this feature is already available in Chrome 76, Firefox 67, Safari 12.1, and Opera 62.

You can optionally check if the browser supports it using Javascript.

if (window.matchMedia('(prefers-color-scheme)').media === 'not all') {
  console.log('Browser doesn\'t support dark mode');
}

I hope this short snippet helped to enhance your site's style.
Happy coding 🚀

Top comments (9)

Kyle Griffin • Sep 11 '19 • Edited

What's more likely to happen in this case is that you'll have color set on specific parts of the site for different things. So the better thing to do is to use CSS variables.

Jaime Rios • Sep 11 '19

Simple but effective. Thanks for sharing

Just to enrich the conversation I want to add that another consideration is that if you are using styled-components a dark theme might be accomplished with something in a similar way, for example:

const prefersDark = window.matchMedia && window.matchMedia('(prefers-color-scheme: dark)').matches

const lightTheme = {
    color: 'black',
    backgroundColor: 'white',
};

const darkTheme = {
    color: 'white',
    backgroundColor: 'black',
};

// ...

render() {
    return(
        <ThemeProvider theme={prefersDark ? darkTheme : lightTheme} >
        </ThemeProvider>
    );
}