React Konva is a JavaScript library for drawing complex canvas graphics using React.

It provides declarative and reactive bindings to the Konva Framework.

An attempt to make React work with the HTML5 canvas library. The goal is to have similar declarative markup as normal React and to have similar data-flow model.

Currently you can use all Konva components as React components and all Konva events are supported on them in same way as normal browser events are supported.

npm install react-konva konva --save

import React, { Component } from 'react';
import { render } from 'react-dom';
import { Stage, Layer, Rect, Text } from 'react-konva';
import Konva from 'konva';

class ColoredRect extends React.Component {
  state = {
    color: 'green'
  };
  handleClick = () => {
    this.setState({
      color: Konva.Util.getRandomColor()
    });
  };
  render() {
    return (
      <Rect
        x={20}
        y={20}
        width={50}
        height={50}
        fill={this.state.color}
        shadowBlur={5}
        onClick={this.handleClick}
      />
    );
  }
}

class App extends Component {
  render() {
    return (
      <Stage width={window.innerWidth} height={window.innerHeight}>
        <Layer>
          <Text text="Try click on rect" />
          <ColoredRect />
        </Layer>
      </Stage>
    );
  }
}

render(<App />, document.getElementById('root'));

To get more info about Konva you can read Konva Overview.

Actually you don't need to learn react-konva. Just learn Konva framework, you will understand how to use react-konva

react-canvas is a completely different react plugin. It allows you to draw DOM-like objects (images, texts) on canvas element in very performant way. It is NOT about drawing graphics, but react-konva is exactly for drawing complex graphics on <canvas> element from React.

react-art allows you to draw graphics on a page. It also supports SVG for output. But it has no support of events of shapes.

Vanilla canvas is faster because when you use react-konva you have two layers of abstractions. Konva framework is on top of canvas and React is on top of Konva. Depending on the use case this approach can be slow. The purpose of react-konva is to reduce the complexity of the application and use well-known declarative way for drawing on canvas.

Note: you can find a lot of demos and examples of using Konva there: http://konvajs.github.io/. Really, just go there and take a look what Konva can do for you. You will be able to do the same with react-konva too.

To get reference of Konva instance of a node you can use ref property.

class MyShape extends React.Component {
  componentDidMount() {
    // log Konva.Circle instance
    console.log(this.circle);
  }
  render() {
    return <Circle ref={ref => (this.circle = ref)} radius={50} fill="black" />;
  }
}