If you are wondering how to run React's useEffect Hook only once , you may be surprised that you need React's useRef Hook as helper to create an instance variable for tracking the component's lifecycle. The following code shows you how to achieve it: If you want to have a reusable custom hook for it, which only triggers the effect function once…

Personally I bootstrapped a lot of React projects over the last years. I always had to setup the project from scratch, however, eventually I have created my own boilerplate project on GitHub for it. As you might know, uncountable React boilerplate projects and repositories were created that way. But the article is not my attempt to advertise yet…

I always struggled to use SVG in my React applications. Every time I searched about the topic online, I've found many ways on how to use SVG in React, but once I implemented the approaches, the success rates were very low. Today I want to give you a straightforward approach on how to use SVG icons as React components for your next React application…

If you happen to have a custom Webpack setup, you may be wondering how to set up React Router with Webpack. Let's say we have the following minimal React application using React Router: If you open your React application and navigate between both paths, everything should be fine. However, if you navigate via the browser's URL bar to /about, you…

In a modern React world, everyone uses function components with React Hooks . However, the concept of higher-order components (HOC) is still applicable in a modern React world, because they can be used for class components and function components. Therefore they are the perfect bridge for using reusable abstractions among legacy and modern…

In this tutorial we will implement use JavaScript fake API with mock data from a pseudo backend to create our frontend application with React. Often this helps whenever there is no backend yet and you need to implement your React frontend against some kind of realistic data. You can find the finished project on GitHub . React with Mock Data from a…

React Hooks were introduced at React Conf October 2018 as a way to use state and side-effects (see lifecycle methods in class components) in React function components. Whereas function components have been called functional stateless components (FSC) before, they are finally able to use state with React Hooks and therefore many people refer to…

If you have started to use React's useState hook for your application, you may be missing a callback function , because only the initial state can be passed to the hook. In React class components, the setState method offers an optional second argument to pass a callback function. However, this second argument isn't available for React's useState…

React's useMemo Hook can be used to optimize the computation costs of your React function components . We will go through an example component to illustrate the problem first, and then solve it with React's useMemo Hook . Keep in mind that most of the performance optimizations in React are premature. React is fast by default, so every…