Difference between @material-ui vs material-ui (without at-sign)

Question

Just starting (again) with material UI and react. There are two packages material-ui and @material-ui, which is the best starting point (latest) as of 2019-07 timeframe?

I think it is npm install @material-ui/core based on ... https://material-ui.com/getting-started/installation/. The GIT repo is at https://github.com/mui-org/material-ui

Simple question, hopefully simple answer.

Other questions I looked at:

• Use Create-React-App with Material UI - This answer says to use npm install --save material-ui but because it is 2 years old, I think it may be out of date.

• Difference between Material-Ui and Material-Ui-Next

• How to install Material-UI Docs WITHOUT installing material-ui?

Answer 1

@material-ui/core is the correct one to use for v4. For v5, the equivalent package is @mui/material.

If you go to https://www.npmjs.com/package/material-ui, you'll see that material-ui is deprecated. The last stable version in the material-ui package was 0.20.2. For the 1.0 release it moved to @material-ui/core and for the stable release of v5 it moved to @mui/material.

The @material-ui scope (for v4) is used for the following packages that are all managed within the monorepo you referenced (https://github.com/mui-org/material-ui/tree/v4.12.3/packages):

• @material-ui/core
• @material-ui/icons
• @material-ui/styles
• @material-ui/system
• @material-ui/lab
• @material-ui/utils
• @material-ui/types
• @material-ui/docs
• @material-ui/codemod

Similarly, the @mui scope (for v5) is used for the similar set of packages supported for v5 (https://github.com/mui-org/material-ui/tree/master/packages):

• @mui/material
  • This is the equivalent of @material-ui/core
• @mui/core
  • This is the NOT the equivalent of @material-ui/core. @mui/core is a new package for unstyled (no Material-Design CSS applied) versions of the components.
• @mui/icons-material
• @mui/styles
  • This is for supporting the withStyles and makeStyles JSS-backed styling APIs and is not recommended for use in new projects.
• @mui/system
• @mui/lab
• @mui/utils
• @mui/types
• @mui/docs
• @mui/codemod