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React router V6: Some of the new changes

Gabriel Bittencourt on November 19, 2021

So not too long ago the library React Router has updated to version 6 and with that it came with some interesting changes that I notice and see pe...

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Sergei Garcia • Nov 20 '21 • Edited

Thanks for the article! As for feedback and anyone else reading this, you missed a lot of the more important, key, breaking changes React Router v6 introduced which you might want to double check. I think you focused a little too much on some of the less important ones (like NavLink's className prop)

The <Route> component has now deprecated its children & render props, so it's no longer possible to pass router props like history / location / match to components. You should now use the useNavigate / useLocation / useParams hooks.
The withRouter Higher Order Component which made it possible to get router props anywhere has also been deprecated in favor of React Hooks
The new <Routes> component that replaces <Switch> works entirely different now. It now will always focus on matching the most specific route instead of the first one it finds, making it more predictable.
Relative links work dramatically better and more predictably now.
Route patterns using Regexp are now deprecated, the only supported symbols are now : for dynamic routes (user/:id) and the * wildcard which can only be used at the end.

For anyone else curious to learn more about these v6 changes (and the reason behind them), I would strongly discourage any kind of video material such as the one linked from Academind linked, and instead recommend the official React Router v6 announcement blog post which does an incredibly great job explaining all the changes in a well explained, yet concise manner. As well as the reasons that drove the team to make them.

Robera Insarmu • Feb 22 '23

very well noted

Atefeh Pahlevan • Jun 2 '22

Thanks for the post you made about the difference between version 5 and 6. I hope you are always successful.

Matteo Notaro • Nov 23 '21

I'm trying it but there's one thing that hurts me...
I'm from Angular and i've noticed that you have to declare in one single place ALL the possible routes of the app (for nested routing you have to declare them inside a Route like this

<Route path={"father"} element={Father}> <Route path={"child"} element={Child}/> </Route>

It is possible to have a more "clean" way to declare the sub-path in the father component?

Gabriel Bittencourt • Nov 24 '21 • Edited

So you can attach at the end of the path of your father component a "/*", so react router will know that this route will only show if it starts with that path name and not the exact path name like this

<Routes>
  <Route path="/welcome/*" component={<Father />} />
</Routes>

And then have other paths starting with the same path name but with some additional name at the end, so inside the father component you have it's child component and there you can put the nested route for that specific path name to render the child component like this

<Routes>
  <Route path="new-user" component={<Child />} />
</Routes>

So you don't have to put all the routes in to the same file, and if they're nested routes you can just add the "/*" at the end of that path name and create a route inside the child component, so it loads when it match's the URL.