Minimalist routing in Redux

README.md

Why would you want to do this? Because you often don't need more. It's nice to not have to think about your "router" as this big special thing.

Instead, with this approch, your app's current pathname is just another piece of state, just like anything else.

This also means that when doing server-side rendering of a redux app, you can just do:

var app = require('your/redux/app')
var React = require('react')

// pass the URL like any other piece of data
React.renderToString(app.render({url: '/about'}))

The react-internal-nav component makes sure internal navigation clicks are captured, then we turn it into an SET_URL action dispatch.

This example has extremely simple url matching with just a few if statements, but this could easily be elaborated on if you needed it, using some kind of lightweight string route matcher, such as:

• https://www.npmjs.com/package/routes
• https://github.com/Matt-Esch/http-hash
• https://github.com/glassresistor/i40
• https://github.com/bevacqua/ruta3

While standalone history management tools exist, such as https://browserstate.github.io/history.js/demo/ or https://github.com/rackt/history they're concerned with proper handling the state part of pushState APIs. Personally, I don't want to put state there anyway and if you don't care about that part, the actual browser support for plain pushState is quite good.

actions - UrlActions.js

import { SET_URL } from '../constants/ActionTypes'

function pushState(url) {
  if (url !== window.location.pathname) {
    window.history.pushState({}, '', url)
  }
}

export function setUrl(text) {
  pushState(text)
  return {
    type: SET_URL,
    text
  }
}

constants - ActionTypes.js

export const SET_URL = 'SET_URL'

containers - App.js

/* global __IS_DEV__*/
import React from 'react'
import { createStore, combineReducers } from 'redux'
import { Provider } from 'react-redux'
import FooApp from './FooApp'
import * as reducers from '../reducers'
import * as UrlActions from '../actions/UrlActions'

export default class App {
  // note that we take data as an argument here
  render (data) {
    // ...and pass it through as initial state  for server rendering
    let store = createStore(createStore(reducers), data)

    if (typeof window !== 'undefined') {
      window.addEventListener('popstate', () => {
        store.dispatch(UrlActions.setUrl(window.location.pathname))
      })
      
      store.dispatch(UrlActions.setUrl(window.location.pathname))
    }

    return (
      <Provider store={store}>
        {() => <FooApp />}
      </Provider>
    )
  }
}

containers - FooApp.js

import React from 'react'
import { bindActionCreators } from 'redux'
import { Connector } from 'react-redux'
import InternalNav from 'react-internal-nav'
import AboutPage from '../components/about-page'
import DataPage from '../components/data-page'
import PersonDetail from '../components/person-detail'
import * as UrlActions from '../actions/UrlActions'

export default class FooApp {
  render() {
    return (
      <Connector>
        {this.renderChild}
      </Connector>
    )
  }

  renderChild({ personData: {persons}, dispatch, url }) {
    const actions = {
      ...bindActionCreators(UrlActions, dispatch)
    }

    let page
    
    // more sophisticated url matching could easily be done with any of these:
    // https://github.com/Matt-Esch/http-hash
    // https://github.com/glassresistor/i40
    // https://github.com/bevacqua/ruta3

    if (url === '/') {
      page = (<h1>Home</h1>)
    } else if (url === '/about') {
      page = (<AboutPage/>)
    } else if (url === '/data') {
      page = (<DataPage persons={persons}/>)
    } else {
      let match
      persons.some(person => {
        if (person.slug === url.slice(1)) {
          match = person
          return true
        }
      })
      if (match) {
        page = (<PersonDetail person={match} {...actions}/>)
      } else {
        page = (<h1>404</h1>)
      }
    }

    return (
      <InternalNav onInternalNav={actions.setUrl}>
        <header>
          <nav role='navigation'>
            <a href='/'>Example.com</a>
            <span>
              <a href="/data">Notes</a>
              <a href="/about">About</a>
            </span>
          </nav>
        </header>
        {page}
      </InternalNav>
    )
  }
}

Wow this is slick

I built something very similar for an old school Flux app (http://cassandra.build) and I never felt where to put the routing logic. Into a store, action, some util? But it's so clear for redux! Thx @gaearon and all other folks for their awesome work!

I was experimenting with this idea a while now, i have created the redux-tiny-router please send in feedback