Single-page applications (SPAs) rewrite sections of a page rather than loading entire new pages from a server.
For reference, the code of the final example is available on GitHub. You can find an interactive demo on CodeSandbox.
To demonstrate how React Router DOM works, we’ll create an example React app.
We’ll also review the essential components of the framework and demonstrate how to build routes with parameters, like /messages/10.
We’ll cover the general concept of a router and how to set up and install React Router. In this post, I’ll get you started with the basics of the web version, React Router DOM. But if you’re just starting out with React Router, all that might be too much to wrap your head around. We’ve covered React Router extensively, including how to use Hooks alongside and instead of React Router, how to use React Router with Redux, and other advanced use cases. It may still contain information that is out of date. Find me at React Router DOM: How to handle routing in web appsĮditor’s note: This React Router DOM tutorial was last updated on 11 August 2021. Like books, movies, and still trying many things.
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You can check out more features in the React Router documentation. Alright, we won't start another tutorial at the end of the article. This pretty much covers the basics for getting started, but there are a lot more cooler features.įor example, you can use useNavigate to push users to various pages, and you can use useLocation to get the current URL. ConclusionĪt this point, we have seen how to install, set up and use the basic features of React Router to navigate to different pages in your app. Recall that we created the pathnames listed in the App component so when you click on the link, it will look through your routes and render the component with the corresponding pathname.Īlways remember to import Link from react-router-dom before using it. Its to attribute specifies which path the link takes you to.
The Link component is similar to the anchor element () in HTML. This is what the index.js looked like initially: import React from 'react' Īfter making changes with React Router, this is what you should have: import React from 'react' To do this, open the index.js file in the src folder and import BrowserRouter from react-router-dom and then wrap the root component (the App component) in it. The first thing to do after installation is complete is to make React Router available anywhere in your app. If you are using yarn then use this command: yarn add How to Set Up React Router To install React Router, all you have to do is run npm install in your project terminal and then wait for the installation to complete. So as a single page application, when you navigate to a new component using React Router, the index.html will be rewritten with the component's logic. React Router – like the name implies – helps you route to/navigate to and render your new component in the index.html file. What happens when you have a different component you would prefer to render as a different page? Do you create a new HTML file? The answer is no. This means that there is only one HTML file where your code will be rendered to. All the code you write in your App component which acts as the root component gets rendered to this HTML file. When you create a new project, you'll always see an index.html file in the public folder. This is the general idea behind SPAs which allows content to be rendered faster without the page being refreshed. So what React Router does is intercept the request being sent to the server and then injects the contents dynamically from the components we have created. In React, the page contents are created from our components. In non-single page applications, when you click on a link in the browser, a request is sent to the server before the HTML page gets rendered. This section is aimed at beginners – you can to skip it if you already understand what a SPA is and how it relates to React. You need to understand how pages are rendered in a React app before diving into routing.
In this tutorial, we'll talk about what React Router is and how to use it.