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What is Client Side Routing?

2018-11-24

If you’re familiar with traditional web development where you actually have different HTML files for different URL paths, routing in the Single Page App world can be kind of confusing.

Stop telling me there is only one page in your so-called Single Page Application. I’m clicking around your site and I can tell you there is more than one “page” sir!
                                                                                                      --A Very Confused Me

When I started doing modern development, a lot of the explanations I found used a lot of technical jargon alongside more React / Angular / Anything technical jargon. So I wrote this article as a more practical explanation.

How We Used To Do It

Let’s say you had a traditional site with just a bunch of HTML, CSS, and JS files and you just hosted it with a standard web server. If you then visited the site with a URL likehttp://www.yoursite.com/some/path, the web server would actually look in the files and folders on the server. It would look for a folder called some and then a file inside of that called path. Most web servers will then try one more thing if they can’t find a file there. They will also check for /some/path/index.html. Let’s say there is a file at that folder path. The web server reads it’s contents and sends it to the browser. Simple! It’s like a file finder on your computer!

How We Do It Now

However, in the case of a single page web app, like a client rendered React or Angular app. There is nothing at the path /some/path or /some/path/index.html. If you’ve ever looked at the compiled contents of your web application, you’ll probably only see a index.html and an assortment of JS and CSS files. When you click around your application, the fact that the URL may show /some/path to the user is basically a simulation. It gives the user the impression they are navigating between pages. In reality, the JS code simply updating the contents of the existing page and telling the browser to show /some/path as the route. The browser exposes some JS commands called the History API to allow your JS code to do this. In the React world, you are probably using React Router which is doing this manipulation for you.


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