Creating a Button with Gradient Border in React Native

Over the past two months I’ve been working with React Native and in this short tutorial I’ll show how to create a button with a gradient border, just like this one:

To do that, we’ll use a LinearGradient component from Expo. If you’re not familiar with Expo, you can go ahead and read our introduction here .

Getting Started

First let’s start by creating a custom button component:

<TouchableOpacity onPress={() => {})}>
  <View style={styles.circleGradient}>
    <Text style={styles.visit}>Login</Text>
  </View>  
</TouchableOpacity>

And let’s define the styles like this, for rounded corners:

circleGradient: {
  backgroundColor: "white",
  borderRadius: 5
},
visit: {
  margin: 4,
  paddingHorizontal: 6,
  textAlign: "center",
  backgroundColor: "white",
  color: '#008f68',
  fontSize: 12
}

Adding a Gradient Border

React Native doesn’t support gradient borders out of the box, so we’ll nest our View within a View that will be playing a role of gradient border.

First we’ll import LinearGradient from Expo:

import { LinearGradient } from "expo";

Let’s define the positions for the gradient to start and end. According to the documentation we can do this by using the start and end props. The colors prop contains an array of colors that represent the gradient stops.

Then wrap our View with LinearGradient:

<TouchableOpacity onPress={() => {})}>
  <LinearGradient start={[0, 0.5]}
                  end={[1, 0.5]}
                  colors={['#EFBB35', '#4AAE9B']}
                  style={{borderRadius: 5}}>
    <View style={styles.circleGradient}>
      <Text style={styles.visit}>Login</Text>
    </View>
  </LinearGradient>
</TouchableOpacity>

Notice that we apply the borderRadius style to the LinearGradient with the same value as our View. We now have a simple button with rounded border, but no apparent gradient:

That’s because our View and LinearGradient components have the same size. Let’s add a margin to our View component:

circleGradient: {
  margin: 1,
  backgroundColor: "white",
  borderRadius: 5
},

And voilà, we have a nice button with gradient border! 🌈