Build Interactive Product Tours with Shepherd

Ever launched a new feature in your web app, only to get a flood of support tickets asking how it works? Or maybe you've watched users in a session recording completely miss the button you spent weeks perfecting. Onboarding users and guiding them through an interface is a common challenge, but building a robust, good-looking tour system from scratch is a significant distraction from your core product.

That's where Shepherd comes in. It's a JavaScript library that lets you create interactive, step-by-step guided tours for your web application with minimal fuss. Instead of wrestling with z-index issues, focus management, and positioning logic, you can drop in Shepherd and start crafting user journeys in minutes.

What It Does

Shepherd is an open-source library for building site tours. You define a series of "steps," each attaching to a specific element on your page (or floating freely). It handles the UI—a modal-like dialog with buttons—and the logic of moving between steps, ensuring the highlighted element is visible and properly scrolled into view. It's framework-agnostic, with first-class integrations for React, Vue, Angular, and Ember if you need them.

Why It's Cool

The beauty of Shepherd is in its straightforward API and its battle-tested robustness. It's not a flashy, over-engineered solution. It solves the actual problems you encounter when building tours: accessible focus trapping, smart element attachment that handles page scroll and repositioning, and a clean, customizable default theme.

You can control the tour flow with events, conditionally skip steps, or even create complex branching paths. The UI is unopinionated enough that you can style it to match your app perfectly, but the default styling is clean and professional out of the box. It’s been used by large-scale products (like the folks at ShipShape who created it), so you can trust it to handle edge cases you might not have considered.

How to Try It

Getting started is incredibly straightforward. You can install it via npm:

npm install shepherd.js

Or include it via a CDN. Here's a minimal example to create a two-step tour:

import Shepherd from 'shepherd.js';

const tour = new Shepherd.Tour({
  useModalOverlay: true,
  defaultStepOptions: {
    cancelIcon: {
      enabled: true
    }
  }
});

tour.addStep({
  id: 'welcome',
  text: 'Welcome to our app! Let's get you started.',
  buttons: [
    {
      text: 'Next',
      action: tour.next
    }
  ]
});

tour.addStep({
  id: 'feature-button',
  text: 'This is our main feature button. Click it when you're ready.',
  attachTo: {
    element: '.feature-btn',
    on: 'bottom'
  },
  buttons: [
    {
      text: 'Back',
      action: tour.back
    },
    {
      text: 'Finish',
      action: tour.complete
    }
  ]
});

// Start the tour
tour.start();

Check out the live demo on the GitHub repository to see it in action and explore more advanced configurations.

Final Thoughts

Shepherd is one of those tools that does a single job exceptionally well. If your app needs any form of interactive guidance—onboarding flows, feature announcements, or even a helpful tutorial mode—this library will save you days of development and debugging time. It removes the grunt work and lets you focus on crafting a great user experience. In a world of overly complex dependencies, Shepherd is a refreshingly simple and reliable solution.

@githubprojects