Book Image

React Router Quick Start Guide

By : Sagar Ganatra
Book Image

React Router Quick Start Guide

By: Sagar Ganatra

Overview of this book

React Router is the routing library for React, and it can be used in both React Web and React Native applications. This book is a simple way to get started with React Router and harness its full power for your applications. The book starts with an introduction to React Router and teaches you how to create your first route using the React component. You will then learn about configuring your routes, passing parameters, and creating nested routes. You will be introduced to various components in React-Router and learn different configuration options available for these components. You will then see how to use the Redirect and Switch components. For even greater ?exibility, you will learn about BrowserRouter, HashRouter, NativeRouter, and StaticRouter. By the end of the book, you will have set up a project with React Router and make routing configuration work in a server-side rendered React application, a mobile application built with React Native and also understand how Redux and React-Router can be used in the same application.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Introduction to React Router 4 and Creating Your First Route

Single page applications (SPAs) have become the de facto standard for developing applications for the web. Many JavaScript libraries and frameworks have emerged that help frontend engineers in developing SPAs. These include React, Angular, Ember, and Backbone, to name a few. These libraries or frameworks abstract native APIs and provide services and components that can be used to build applications quicker. SPAs are an excellent choice for providing a fluid user experience; as the user traverses through the site, HTTP requests are triggered, and only certain sections of the page are updated, instead of requesting the server for the entire page.

React is an open source JavaScript library that helps you in building user interfaces and the view layer in web and mobile applications. It encourages developers to visualize the view layer as a collection of components that can be reused throughout the application. Most frontend frameworks include a routing package that enables you to update sections of the page when the user clicks through various links provided on the site. A router in a frontend framework listens to the changes in the URL and keeps the application in sync by rendering the corresponding view components. For example, when the user visits '/dashboard', the page would render various dashboard components, such as charts and tables, and when the user visits, say, '/user', the page would list various user attributes. In a React-based application, a Router library is required, since React does not ship with one. React-Router is one such popular routing library built completely with React. The library includes various components that can be used to render views as the user navigates through the application. Apart from matching the URL and rendering the view components, React-Router has several features that help you to configure the routes easily.

In this chapter, the following topics are discussed:

  • A brief look at React: This section introduces you to some of the core concepts in React, such as component-based architecture, creating components in React, and how data can be provided to child components in the application tree
  • Introduction to React-Router: Here, we first create a React application using the create-react-app CLI and then add the React-Router library (the 'react-router-dom' package) as a dependency
  • Creating your first route: After adding React-Router as a dependency, the application's first route is created using the <BrowserRouter> and <Route> components