For my latest project, I wanted to change the background color of the active navigation link in the <Header> when being clicked. When working with <Link> in React (using React-Router) in the past, I had the possibility to add an activeClassName to the <Link> to change the style when being active. But this built-in <Link> is not available in NextJS. Let me show you the differences and how you can add an active class to a <Link> in NextJS.
Table Of Contents
1. React's activeClassName
This special version of the <Link> tag is called <NavLink> and adds styling attributes to the rendered element when it matches the current URL. There are two different ways to add styling.
activeClassName: string
The class is given to the element when it is active by writing:
<NavLink to="/about" activeClassName="active">
About
</NavLink>
activeStyle: object
The styles is applied to the element when it is active by writing:
<NavLink to="/about" activeStyle={{fontWeight: "bold"}}>
About
</NavLink>
2. Create An Active Link In NextJS
The default <Link> component from NextJS doesn't allow to distinguish between active and non-active links. In NextJS, you can use the built-in router to detect an active link.
I am using the useRouter hook inside my "Header function component" and created a ternary operator to check if the <Link> to style matches the currently displayed route.
Here's the code:
import Link from 'next/link';
import { useRouter } from 'next/router';
export const Header = () => {
const router = useRouter();
return (
<header>
<Link href="/">
<a className={router.pathname == "/" ? "active" : ""}>
Home
</a>
</Link>
</header>
)
}
For more information on next/router check out the documentation.
Thanks for your reading and time. I really appreciate it!
Top comments (27)
Just a reminder to those who are reading this, that if you insert
<a/>wrapped inside a custom component inside<Link/>that you should includepassHrefif the<a/>wraps anything other than a string, otherwise your site may take a hit on SEO.Wow, thanks for this information, didn't know about that.
I thank you for taking the time to write this post!
Sadly for Nextjs version 13, your 2 approach seems to be outdated because is an invalid action to have a component with an tag as child (unless you are willing to use "legacybehavior").
With your post you gave me an idea. This solution is a bit raw because still unable to use active pseudo-class in the component
"active" is a set of styles defined in css module.
Let me know if you find something better. Best regards
Hey Juan, thanks for your message. Yeah, wrote that post a long time ago, but I don‘t think I will spend time on this topic any time soon again.
I am sure others are happ about your suggestions, so thank you for that.
why not use tailwind instead of css classes
For Next.js 13
Replace
import { useRouter } from 'next/router';With
import { usePathname } from "next/navigation";Replace
const router = useRouter();With
const pathname = usePathname();and then replace
className={router.pathname == "/" ? "active" : ""}with
className={pathname == "/" ? "active" : ""}Ref: usePathname
Thanks for adding Matt!
Works perfectly for Next.js 14 using Pages Router.
julia it's fantactic tricks
how to change actve style in nextjs?
you save my day. tahnks a lot.
Thanks author you're a life saver.
This helped me out tremendously. Helped me out so much that I created an account just to say thank you!
Thank you so much for your kind words :) Glad it helped!
I'm a backend developer who has no knowledge in next.js. However, I needed to change something in the front-end. It took me much time trying to figure it out myself. Once I found this post, I could do it. Thanks a lot!
Glad that it helped :)
Just a note, it would be sweet if your code samples were gist embeds or code blocks so people could copy/paste from them. The pictures look nice but it makes it harder to copy.
Hey Matt. Thank you so much for your suggestion. I changed the img to code blocks and will continue doing that :)
I would recommend extracting this to a separate function. Then you can do the following:
Then you can do something like this in your links (if you use string literals):
thank you it was very useful