Conditional Dark Mode

I love dark mode in projects and try and support it as often as I can. Forcing users to experience dark mode however is not great. The approach I take on most projects is to first detect whether a user is using dark mode on their device and then enable that feature by adding an attribute to the root element of the page.

function getTheme() {
  if (localStorage.getItem("theme") === null) {
    if (window.matchMedia("(prefers-color-scheme: dark)").matches) {
      localStorage.setItem("theme", "dark");
    } else {
      localStorage.setItem("theme", "light");
    }
  }
  document.documentElement.setAttribute("data-theme", localStorage.getItem("theme"));
}

After implementing the data-attribute you can access this value in your CSS like this:

:root[data-theme="dark"] {
  --color__hue--base: 218deg 100% 100%;
  --color__hue--contrast: 218deg 16% 12%;
  --color__hue--contrast--extra: 218deg 32% 4%;
  --shadow__color: var(--color__hue--contrast--extra);
  --shadow__value: 0.75;
}

Provide An Override

After setting the theme by default it’s always a good idea to allow users to set their own preference if in fact they don’t want a dark theme experience. In my example, I would then append this function to a button click. Notice the icon in the footer of this page.

function setTheme() {
  if (document.documentElement.getAttribute("data-theme") === "dark") {
    localStorage.setItem("theme", "light");
  } else {
    localStorage.setItem("theme", "dark");
  }
  document.documentElement.setAttribute("data-theme", localStorage.getItem("theme"));
}

Remember Me

If you noticed in the code above, in addition to attaching a new data-attribute to the root, we are also storing the user’s preference inside a localStorage item—making it easy for the user to navigate through the rest of the site without losing the value the previously enabled.

Note: if you wanna be extra user friendly you could switch out localStorage for sessionStorage so that their preference sticks around even if they close the page.