02-rendering-a-router.md

Rendering a Router

At its heart, React Router is a component.

render(<Router/>, document.getElementById('app'))

That's not going display anything until we configure a route.

Open up index.js and

1. import Router and Route
2. render a Router instead of App

// ...
import { Router, Route, hashHistory } from 'react-router'

render((
  <Router history={hashHistory}>
    <Route path="/" component={App}/>
  </Router>
), document.getElementById('app'))

Make sure your server is running with npm start and then visit http://localhost:8080

You should get the same screen as before, but this time with some junk in the URL. We're using hashHistory--it manages the routing history with the hash portion of the url. It's got that extra junk to shim some behavior the browser has natively when using real urls. We'll change this to use real urls later and lose the junk, but for now, this works great because it doesn't require any server-side configuration.

Adding More Screens

Create two new components at:

• modules/About.js

• modules/Repos.js

• Inside the components return a div that says:

  • About for About
  • Repos for Repos

Now we can couple them to the app at their respective paths.

• import the modules into your index.js

• then add the following to your Router:

ReactDOM.render((
  <Router history={hashHistory}>
    <Route path="/" component={App}/>
    {/* add the routes here */}
    <Route path="/repos" component={Repos}/>
    <Route path="/about" component={About}/>
  </Router>
), document.getElementById('app'))

Now visit http://localhost:8080/#/about and http://localhost:8080/#/repos

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Next: Navigating With Link