How does serving different pages in React works? - node.js

Question

Let's say I have a react projects, and an Express server for serving my project, as follows(After building the project):
]
This way, only the index.html is served, isn't it? If the user routes to a different page, how is that page sent to him?

Answer 1

Routing in javascript is managed by using HTML5 push state. So every time you click a link and go to another route, the browser history and push state is being used. That's the basis for routing in almost of all the single page applications.
Until and unless you refresh the page, your request doesn't go to the server. Hence, index.html is served only once and after that the router (here the react-router) takes over and manages the routing in url using the history API of the browser.
Hope this helps !

Answer 2

That is done using react-router which manages the routing using the browser's History API.
This style of a website is called a single page application as opposed to a multi page application where the server sends different pages depending on the url you route to.

Answer 3

you can use react-router-dom like this
<Switch>
<Route exact path="/" component={Home}/>
<Route path="/someurl" component={ComponentForSomeUrl}
</Switch>
and render it with BrowserRouter
but you can use something like history.push, in my opinion react-router-dom is really simple and better than react-router
you don't need to send html file to specific route, in case of react express is used for building API (in most cases)

Answer 4

In you React folder you want to do npm install --save react-router-dom.
So inside the React Router family of libraries, there is a couple of different dependencies you can possibly install.
Ensure you never install React Router by itself.
The react-router library as it is published on npm is the core library of everything inside the React Router general project.
So react-router has some core navigational logic inside of it. It decides how to work with React, how to change content out depending on different rules and some other low-level logic.
To gain some actual implementation as it works specifically in the browser, install react-router-dom.
So anytime you want to use React Router on a project to handle navigation, always install react-router-dom, not react-router.
There are other similarly named projects that you might think you need as well, react-router-native for use inside of React Native projects.
In web applications we make use of react-router-dom, we are not making native mobile apps.
React-router-native is for native mobile applications only.
For the browser you always want react-router-dom as opposed to react-router-native
So perhaps in your App.js component you want to set something up that looks like this:
import React from "react";
import { BrowserRouter, Route } from “react-router-dom”;
const App = () => {
return <div>App</div>;
};
export default App;
I also recommend if you are new to React Router to get familiar with it by setting up something temporary like so:
import React from "react";
import { BrowserRouter, Route } from “react-router-dom”;
const PageOne = () => {
return <div>PageOne</div>;
};
const PageTwo = () => {
return <div>PageTwo<button>Click Me</button></div>;
};
const App = () => {
return (
<div>
<BrowserRouter>
<div>
<Route path=“/” exact component={PageOne} />
<Route path=“/pagetwo” component={PageTwo} />
</div>
</BrowserRouter>
</div>
);
};
Visit your localhost:3000 and then your localhost:3000/pagetwo, check out how all that is working.
When we visit a page called localhost:3000 and we type that address into the url it loads up the application.
React Router itself does not care about that entire url, instead React Router only cares about all the characters that are listed after the domain name or port definition.
Localhost:3000 is interpreted as being localhost:3000/
If I go to localhost:3000/ it still loads up my application.
Now I have other examples here if I go to localhost:3000/pageone, React Router only cares about everything after the port and domain
Same thing if I went to airbnb.com/listings/spain react router would only consider /listings/spain when deciding what content to render to the screen.
Notice in the example above I created an instance of BrowserRouter, well BrowserRouter creates an object of its own known as the history object.
This history object is going to look at the URL inside the address bar and extract just that portion of the URL that react router cares about.
The history object is then going to communicate that path over to BrowserRouter who communicates that path to both Route components and those Route components decide whether to show themselves or hide themselves depending on the path that the user is visiting and the path property that it was passed when it was created.