React Router v5: The Complete Guide

React Router is the de facto standard routing library for React. When you need to navigate through a React application with multiple views, you’ll need a router to manage the URLs. React Router takes care of that, keeping your application UI and the URL in sync.

This tutorial introduces you to React Router v5 and a whole lot of things you can do with it.

Introduction

React is a popular library for creating single-page applications (SPAs) that are rendered on the client side. An SPA might have multiple views (aka pages), and unlike the conventional multi-page apps, navigating through these views shouldn’t result in the entire page being reloaded. Instead, we want the views to be rendered inline within the current page. The end user, who’s accustomed to multi-page apps, expects the following features to be present in an SPA:

• Each view in an application should have a URL that uniquely specifies that view. This is so that the user can bookmark the URL for reference at a later time. For example, www.example.com/products.
• The browser’s back and forward button should work as expected.
• The dynamically generated nested views should preferably have a URL of their own too. For example, example.com/products/shoes/101, where 101 is the product ID.

Routing is the process of keeping the browser URL in sync with what’s being rendered on the page. React Router lets you handle routing declaratively. The declarative routing approach allows you to control the data flow in your application, by saying “the route should look like this”:

<Route path=”/about” component={About} />

You can place your <Route> component anywhere you want your route to be rendered. Since <Route>, <Link> and all the other React Router APIs that we’ll be dealing with are just components, you can easily get used to routing in React.

A note before getting started. There’s a common misconception that React Router is an official routing solution developed by Facebook. In reality, it’s a third-party library that’s widely popular for its design and simplicity. If your requirements are limited to routers for navigation, you could implement a custom router from scratch without much hassle. However, understanding how the basics of React Router will give you better insights into how a router should work.

Overview

This tutorial is divided into different sections. First, we’ll be setting up React and React Router using npm. Then we’ll jump right into React Router basics. You’ll find different code demonstrations of React Router in action. The examples covered in this tutorial include:

• basic navigational routing
• nested routing
• nested routing with path parameters
• protected routing

All the concepts connected with building these routes will be discussed along the way. The entire code for the project is available on this GitHub repo. Once you’re inside a particular demo directory, run npm install to install the dependencies. To serve the application on a development server, run npm start and head over to http://localhost:3000/ to see the demo in action.

Read More
http://www.webprogramming.gq/2020/05/react-router-v5-complete-guide.html