In the realm of front-end development, React has emerged as a popular choice for building dynamic and interactive user interfaces. One essential aspect of any web application is navigation - efficiently moving between different views or pages. React Router comes to the rescue by providing a simple and elegant solution for managing navigation within React applications without reloading the page. In this article, we'll explore the basics of React Router through a simple example.

At first, we need to install React Router in our React project:

npm install react-router-dom

Suppose we have a basic React application with four components: Navbar, Home, About, and Contact. Our job is to navigate to Home, About and Contact pages.

Setting up App.jsx:

import { createBrowserRouter, RouterProvider } from 'react-router-dom'
import Home from './components/Home'
import About from './components/About'
import Contact from './components/Contact'
import Navbar from './components/Navbar'

function App() {

  const router = createBrowserRouter([
    {
      path: "/",
      element: <><Navbar /><Home /></>
    },
    {
      path: "/about",
      element: <><Navbar /><About /></>
    },
    {
      path: "/contact",
      element: <><Navbar /><Contact /></>
    },
   ])

  return (
    <>
     <RouterProvider router={router} />
    </>
  )
}

export default App

Creating Component pages:

Let's create four simple component files - Navbar.jsx, Home.jsx, About.jsx, and Contact.jsx.

// Navbar.jsx
import React from 'react'
import { NavLink } from 'react-router-dom'

const Navbar = () => {
  return (
    <div>
      <nav>
        <NavLink className={(e)=>{return e.isActive ? 'red' : ''}} to="/"><li>Home</li></NavLink>
        <NavLink className={(e)=>{return e.isActive ? 'red' : ''}} to="/about"><li>About</li></NavLink>
        <NavLink className={(e)=>{return e.isActive ? 'red' : ''}} to="/contact"><li>Contact</li></NavLink>
      </nav>
    </div>
  )
}

export default Navbar

// Home.jsx
import React from 'react'

const Home = () => {
  return (
    <div>
      <h2>I am Home</h2>
    </div>
  )
}

export default Home

// About.jsx
import React from 'react'

const About = () => {
  return (
    <div>
      <h2>I am About</h2>
    </div>
  )
}

export default About

// Contact.jsx
import React from 'react'

const Contact = () => {
  return (
    <div>
      <h2>I am Contact</h2>
    </div>
  )
}

export default Contact

I have styled the Navbar a bit:

/* index.css */
*{
    padding: 0;
    margin: 0;
}

nav{
  display: flex;
  gap: 34px;
  background-color: black;
}

li{
  list-style: none;
  padding: 23px;
  color: white;
}

.red{
  background-color: red;
  color: white;
}

Output:

In this simple example, we've demonstrated how to set up basic routing in a React application using React Router. With React Router, managing navigation in React applications becomes a breeze, allowing developers to focus on building rich user interfaces.