React Router

React Router is the standard routing library for React applications, created by Ryan Florence and Michael Jackson of React Training and now maintained by Shopify. The latest version 8 is a non-breaking upgrade from version 7, targeting Node.js 22 and above, Vite 7 and above, React 19 and above, and an ESM-only module system. With nearly 4 billion lifetime npm downloads, over 56,000 GitHub stars, 1,287 contributors, and approximately 3.6 million dependent packages, React Router is the most widely installed routing solution in the React ecosystem. The router implements a multi-strategy architecture supporting both declarative component-based routing using the Routes and Route JSX elements and data-centric routing with loaders, actions, and fetchers that handle data fetching and mutations at the route level. Version 7 introduced framework features that blur the line between a library and a full-stack framework, including server-side rendering, static pre-rendering, route-level code splitting, and a type-safe href utility that validates link targets at compile time. React Router follows web standards conventions, using the standard History API, Request and Response objects, and URL pattern matching rather than custom abstractions. The project operates under an Open Governance model with public proposals, discussions, and community-driven feature prioritization. The router can be deployed to any hosting platform, including Vercel, Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, Deno Deploy, and traditional Node.js servers. Type-safe routing APIs provide compile-time guarantees for route parameters, search parameters, and loader return types, eliminating entire categories of runtime errors.