React Router Basic Nav

Topics:

  • Single Page Applications
  • React Router V4 (react-router-dom)
  • Routing, declarative component based routing
  • Path and Component

Project Description

  • A starter pack project for all things React Router. Learn to set up a basic routing system within an application. Use this application to help guide your learning over the next couple of days.
  • Note that this project has already been boilerplated for you. There is no need to run any installation steps beyond yarn install.

Initialize Project

  • cd into the repository and run yarn install
  • run yarn start

Steps for implementing React Router

  • You'll notice we've already installed react-router-dom for you.
  • import your BrowserRouter as Router inside your index.js file.
  • Wrap your <App /> component that you're passing to ReactDOM.render() with your new Router component.
  • open up your chrome REACT DEV TOOLS and notice your app is now all wrapped in BrowserRouter
  • inside the REACT DEV TOOLS expand <BrowserRouter> and highlight <Router> and notice that here is a "history" object on props and a "match" object on its state. These two objects are how all of our Router is going to work.

Steps for "Declaring" your routes

  • Inside of your App.js file import { Route } from 'react-router-dom';
  • This is where we're going to declare and specify our router.
  • Create 3 <Route /> setting their path prop equal to /, /about, /contact with their respective components.
  • Be sure to incluce the exact prop on the root component for / to make sure that it's rendering the exact component and not all the other components.

Steps for setting up your Navigation

  • Inside of Navigation.js import { Link } from 'react-router-dom'.
  • Declare the to as the href on <Link> and specify the correct routes for your app to navigate towards.
  • Head over to your app and start navigating. You should be able to see your URLS changing their paths as you go. Each path should display the proper component.

Resources