How to create a toggle button in Bootstrap

Initial answer from 2013

An excellent (unofficial) Bootstrap Switch is available.

Classic 2013 Switch

<input type="checkbox" name="my-checkbox" checked>
$("[name='my-checkbox']").bootstrapSwitch();

It uses radio types or checkboxes as switches. A type attribute has been added since V.1.8.

Source code is available on Github.

Note from 2018

I would not recommend to use those kind of old Switch buttons now, as they always seemed to suffer of usability issues as pointed by many people.

Please consider having a look at modern Switches like this one from the React Component framework (not Bootstrap related, but can be integrated in Bootstrap grid and UI though).

Other implementations exist for Angular, View or jQuery.

Modern 2018 Switch

import '../assets/index.less'
import React from 'react'
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom'
import Switch from 'rc-switch'

class Switcher extends React.Component {
  state = {
    disabled: false,
  }

  toggle = () => {
    this.setState({
      disabled: !this.state.disabled,
    })
  }

  render() {
    return (
      <div style={{ margin: 20 }}>
        <Switch
          disabled={this.state.disabled}
          checkedChildren={'开'}
          unCheckedChildren={'关'}
        />
        </div>
      </div>
    )
  }
}

ReactDOM.render(<Switcher />, document.getElementById('__react-content'))

Native Bootstrap Switches

See ohkts11's answer below about the native Bootstrap switches.


If you don't mind changing your HTML, you can use the data-toggle attribute on <button>s. See the Single toggle section of the button examples:

<button type="button" class="btn btn-primary" data-toggle="button">
    Single toggle
</button>

Bootstrap 3 has options to create toggle buttons based on checkboxes or radio buttons: http://getbootstrap.com/javascript/#buttons

Checkboxes

<div class="btn-group" data-toggle="buttons">
  <label class="btn btn-primary active">
    <input type="checkbox" checked> Option 1 (pre-checked)
  </label>
  <label class="btn btn-primary">
    <input type="checkbox"> Option 2
  </label>
  <label class="btn btn-primary">
    <input type="checkbox"> Option 3
  </label>
</div>

Radio buttons

<div class="btn-group" data-toggle="buttons">
  <label class="btn btn-primary active">
    <input type="radio" name="options" id="option1" checked> Option 1 (preselected)
  </label>
  <label class="btn btn-primary">
    <input type="radio" name="options" id="option2"> Option 2
  </label>
  <label class="btn btn-primary">
    <input type="radio" name="options" id="option3"> Option 3
  </label>
</div>

For these to work you must initialize .btns with Bootstrap's Javascript:

$('.btn').button();