Solution 1:

Material UI have implemented their own Flexbox layout via the Grid component.

It appears they initially wanted to keep themselves as purely a 'components' library. But one of the core developers decided it was too important not to have their own. It has now been merged into the core code and was released with v1.0.0.

You can install it via:

npm install @material-ui/core

It is now in the official documentation with code examples.

Solution 2:

From the description of material design specs:

Grid Lists are an alternative to standard list views. Grid lists are distinct from grids used for layouts and other visual presentations.

If you are looking for a much lightweight Grid component library, I'm using React-Flexbox-Grid, the implementation of flexboxgrid.css in React.

On top of that, React-Flexbox-Grid played nicely with both material-ui, and react-toolbox (the alternative material design implementation).

Solution 3:

I looked around for an answer to this and the best way I found was to use Flex and inline styling on different components.

For example, to make two paper components divide my full screen in 2 vertical components (in ration of 1:4), the following code works fine.

const styles = {
  div:{
    display: 'flex',
    flexDirection: 'row wrap',
    padding: 20,
    width: '100%'
  },
  paperLeft:{
    flex: 1,
    height: '100%',
    margin: 10,
    textAlign: 'center',
    padding: 10
  },
  paperRight:{
    height: 600,
    flex: 4,
    margin: 10,
    textAlign: 'center',
  }
};

class ExampleComponent extends React.Component {
  render() {
    return (
      <div>
        <div style={styles.div}>
          <Paper zDepth={3} style={styles.paperLeft}>
            <h4>First Vertical component</h4>
          </Paper>
          <Paper zDepth={3} style={styles.paperRight}>
              <h4>Second Vertical component</h4>
          </Paper>
        </div>
      </div>
    )
  }
}

Now, with some more calculations, you can easily divide your components on a page.

Further Reading on flex

Solution 4:

I hope this is not too late to give a response.

I was also looking for a simple, robust, flexible and highly customizable bootstrap like react grid system to use in my projects.

The best I know of is react-pure-grid https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-pure-grid

react-pure-grid gives you the power to customize every aspect of your grid system, while at the same time it has built in defaults which probably suits any project

Usage

npm install react-pure-grid --save

-

import {Container, Row, Col} from 'react-pure-grid';

const App = () => (
      <Container>
        <Row>
          <Col xs={6} md={4} lg={3}>Hello, world!</Col>
        </Row>
        <Row>
            <Col xsOffset={5} xs={7}>Welcome!</Col>
        </Row>
      </Container>
);

Solution 5:

The way I do is go to http://getbootstrap.com/customize/ and only check "grid system" to download. There are bootstrap-theme.css and bootstrap.css in downloaded files, and I only need the latter.

In this way, I can use the grid system of Bootstrap, with everything else from Material UI.