Excluding stories from production

[unional]

Summary

Is there a build-in tag such as internal, private, or !production that when building storybook for production NODE_ENV=production storybook build, those stories will be automatically excluded?

I would like to use Storybook as the primary development platform so I want to create stories for internal components and functions.

But I want to exclude them from the public Storybook.

Additional information

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Create a reproduction

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[JReinhold]

There is not, however a viable workaround is to depend on environment variables that control which stories are matched in the glob pattern configured in the main configuration. We've used that a couple of places in the past, but you can see one place where we do this today:

1. make stories glob conditional on an env var: https://github.com/storybookjs/addon-svelte-csf/blob/b5c9e39a2079b83bad002d65503e9c70c0d0fc70/.storybook/main.ts#L3-L17
2. Set the env var when building the Storybook: https://github.com/storybookjs/addon-svelte-csf/blob/main/.github/workflows/chromatic.yml#L46-L47

Essentially, in your main.ts you conditionally apply story globs based on some env var:

export default {
  stories: [
    process.env.BUILD_ONLY === 'true' ? '../src/**/!(*.dev-only).stories.ts' : '../src/**/*.stories.ts'
  ]
}

You're free to do whatever logic you want, the above would filter out any files called X.dev-only.stories.ts when BUILD_ONLY is true. Then in our package script you just add that env var to the build script, "build-storybook": "BUILD_ONLY=true npm run storybook build".

You could potentially just use NODE_ENV=production directly instead of defining your own environment variable, I haven't tried that.

[unional]

Hi, I ended up creating a interanl tag for it, and add this in the .storybook/main.ts:

export default {
	tags: {
		internal: {
			excludeFromSidebar: process.env.NODE_ENV === 'production',
		},
	}
}

I've also added it to @repobuddy/storybook to give it a nice emoji.