React 18 supports all modern browsers (Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc).

If you support older browsers and devices such as Internet Explorer which do not provide modern browser features natively or have non-compliant implementations, consider including a global polyfill in your bundled application.

Here is a list of the modern features React 18 uses:

• Promise


• Symbol


• Object.assign

The correct polyfill for these features depend on your environment. For many users, you can configure your Browserlist settings. For others, you may need to import polyfills like core-js directly.

Single-page Application

A single-page application is an application that loads a single HTML page and all the necessary assets (such as JavaScript and CSS) required for the application to run. Any interactions with the page or subsequent pages do not require a round trip to the server which means the page is not reloaded.

Though you may build a single-page application in React, it is not a requirement. React can also be used for enhancing small parts of existing websites with additional interactivity. Code written in React can coexist peacefully with markup rendered on the server by something like PHP, or with other client-side libraries. In fact, this is exactly how React is being used at Facebook.

ES6, ES2015, ES2016, etc

These acronyms all refer to the most recent versions of the ECMAScript Language Specification standard, which the JavaScript language is an implementation of. The ES6 version (also known as ES2015) includes many additions to the previous versions such as: arrow functions, classes, template literals, let and const statements. You can learn more about specific versions here.

Compilers

A JavaScript compiler takes JavaScript code, transforms it and returns JavaScript code in a different format. The most common use case is to take ES6 syntax and transform it into syntax that older browsers are capable of interpreting. Babel is the compiler most commonly used with React.

Bundlers

Bundlers take JavaScript and CSS code written as separate modules (often hundreds of them), and combine them together into a few files better optimized for the browsers. Some bundlers commonly used in React applications include Webpack and Browserify.

Package Managers

Package managers are tools that allow you to manage dependencies in your project. npm and Yarn are two package managers commonly used in React applications. Both of them are clients for the same npm package registry.

CDN

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. CDNs deliver cached, static content from a network of servers across the globe.

JSX

JSX is a syntax extension to JavaScript. It is similar to a template language, but it has full power of JavaScript. JSX gets compiled to React.createElement() calls which return plain JavaScript objects called “React elements”. To get a basic introduction to JSX see the docs here and find a more in-depth tutorial on JSX here.

React DOM uses camelCase property naming convention instead of HTML attribute names. For example, tabindex becomes tabIndex in JSX. The attribute class is also written as className since class is a reserved word in JavaScript:

<h1 className="hello">My name is Clementine!</h1>

Elements

React elements are the building blocks of React applications. One might confuse elements with a more widely known concept of “components”. An element describes what you want to see on the screen. React elements are immutable.

const element = <h1>Hello, world</h1>;

Typically, elements are not used directly, but get returned from components.

Components

React components are small, reusable pieces of code that return a React element to be rendered to the page. The simplest version of React component is a plain JavaScript function that returns a React element:

function Welcome(props) {
  return <h1>Hello, {props.name}</h1>;
}

Components can also be ES6 classes:

class Welcome extends React.Component {
  render() {
    return <h1>Hello, {this.props.name}</h1>;
  }
}

Components can be broken down into distinct pieces of functionality and used within other components. Components can return other components, arrays, strings and numbers. A good rule of thumb is that if a part of your UI is used several times (Button, Panel, Avatar), or is complex enough on its own (App, FeedStory, Comment), it is a good candidate to be a reusable component. Component names should also always start with a capital letter ( <Wrapper/> not <wrapper/> ). See this documentation for more information on rendering components.

props

props are inputs to a React component. They are data passed down from a parent component to a child component.

Remember that props are readonly. They should not be modified in any way:

// Wrong!
props.number = 42;

If you need to modify some value in response to user input or a network response, use state instead.

props.children

props.children is available on every component. It contains the content between the opening and closing tags of a component. For example:

<Welcome>Hello world!</Welcome>

The string Hello world! is available in props.children in the Welcome component:

function Welcome(props) {
  return <p>{props.children}</p>;
}

For components defined as classes, use this.props.children :

class Welcome extends React.Component {
  render() {
    return <p>{this.props.children}</p>;
  }
}

state

A component needs state when some data associated with it changes over time. For example, a Checkbox component might need isChecked in its state, and a NewsFeed component might want to keep track of fetchedPosts in its state.

The most important difference between state and props is that props are passed from a parent component, but state is managed by the component itself. A component cannot change its props , but it can change its state .

For each particular piece of changing data, there should be just one component that “owns” it in its state. Don’t try to synchronize states of two different components. Instead, lift it up to their closest shared ancestor, and pass it down as props to both of them.

Lifecycle Methods

Lifecycle methods are custom functionality that gets executed during the different phases of a component. There are methods available when the component gets created and inserted into the DOM (mounting), when the component updates, and when the component gets unmounted or removed from the DOM.

Controlled vs. Uncontrolled Components

React has two different approaches to dealing with form inputs.

An input form element whose value is controlled by React is called a controlled component . When a user enters data into a controlled component a change event handler is triggered and your code decides whether the input is valid (by re-rendering with the updated value). If you do not re-render then the form element will remain unchanged.

An uncontrolled component works like form elements do outside of React. When a user inputs data into a form field (an input box, dropdown, etc) the updated information is reflected without React needing to do anything. However, this also means that you can’t force the field to have a certain value.

In most cases you should use controlled components.

Keys

A “key” is a special string attribute you need to include when creating arrays of elements. Keys help React identify which items have changed, are added, or are removed. Keys should be given to the elements inside an array to give the elements a stable identity.

Keys only need to be unique among sibling elements in the same array. They don’t need to be unique across the whole application or even a single component.

Don’t pass something like Math.random() to keys. It is important that keys have a “stable identity” across re-renders so that React can determine when items are added, removed, or re-ordered. Ideally, keys should correspond to unique and stable identifiers coming from your data, such as post.id .

Refs

React supports a special attribute that you can attach to any component. The ref attribute can be an object created by React.createRef() function or a callback function, or a string (in legacy API). When the ref attribute is a callback function, the function receives the underlying DOM element or class instance (depending on the type of element) as its argument. This allows you to have direct access to the DOM element or component instance.

Use refs sparingly. If you find yourself often using refs to “make things happen” in your app, consider getting more familiar with top-down data flow.

Events

Handling events with React elements has some syntactic differences:

• React event handlers are named using camelCase, rather than lowercase.


• With JSX you pass a function as the event handler, rather than a string.

Reconciliation

When a component’s props or state change, React decides whether an actual DOM update is necessary by comparing the newly returned element with the previously rendered one. When they are not equal, React will update the DOM. This process is called “reconciliation”.

Hooks are a new addition in React 16.8. They let you use state and other React features without writing a class.

import React, { useState } from 'react';

function Example() {
  // Declare a new state variable, which we'll call "count"  const [count, setCount] = useState(0);
  return (
    <div>
      <p>You clicked {count} times</p>
      <button onClick={() => setCount(count + 1)}>
        Click me
      </button>
    </div>
  );
}

This new function useState is the first “Hook” we’ll learn about, but this example is just a teaser. Don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense yet!

You can start learning Hooks on the next page. On this page, we’ll continue by explaining why we’re adding Hooks to React and how they can help you write great applications.

Note

React 16.8.0 is the first release to support Hooks. When upgrading, don’t forget to update all packages, including React DOM.
React Native has supported Hooks since the 0.59 release of React Native.

Video Introduction

At React Conf 2018, Sophie Alpert and Dan Abramov introduced Hooks, followed by Ryan Florence demonstrating how to refactor an application to use them. Watch the video here:

No Breaking Changes

Before we continue, note that Hooks are:

• Completely opt-in. You can try Hooks in a few components without rewriting any existing code. But you don’t have to learn or use Hooks right now if you don’t want to.


• 100% backwards-compatible. Hooks don’t contain any breaking changes.


• Available now. Hooks are now available with the release of v16.8.0.

There are no plans to remove classes from React. You can read more about the gradual adoption strategy for Hooks in the bottom section of this page.

Hooks don’t replace your knowledge of React concepts. Instead, Hooks provide a more direct API to the React concepts you already know: props, state, context, refs, and lifecycle. As we will show later, Hooks also offer a new powerful way to combine them.

If you just want to start learning Hooks, feel free to jump directly to the next page! You can also keep reading this page to learn more about why we’re adding Hooks, and how we’re going to start using them without rewriting our applications.

Motivation

Hooks solve a wide variety of seemingly unconnected problems in React that we’ve encountered over five years of writing and maintaining tens of thousands of components. Whether you’re learning React, use it daily, or even prefer a different library with a similar component model, you might recognize some of these problems.

It’s hard to reuse stateful logic between components

React doesn’t offer a way to “attach” reusable behavior to a component (for example, connecting it to a store). If you’ve worked with React for a while, you may be familiar with patterns like render props and higher-order components that try to solve this. But these patterns require you to restructure your components when you use them, which can be cumbersome and make code harder to follow. If you look at a typical React application in React DevTools, you will likely find a “wrapper hell” of components surrounded by layers of providers, consumers, higher-order components, render props, and other abstractions. While we could filter them out in DevTools, this points to a deeper underlying problem: React needs a better primitive for sharing stateful logic.

With Hooks, you can extract stateful logic from a component so it can be tested independently and reused. Hooks allow you to reuse stateful logic without changing your component hierarchy. This makes it easy to share Hooks among many components or with the community.

We’ll discuss this more in Building Your Own Hooks.

Complex components become hard to understand

We’ve often had to maintain components that started out simple but grew into an unmanageable mess of stateful logic and side effects. Each lifecycle method often contains a mix of unrelated logic. For example, components might perform some data fetching in componentDidMount and componentDidUpdate . However, the same componentDidMount method might also contain some unrelated logic that sets up event listeners, with cleanup performed in componentWillUnmount . Mutually related code that changes together gets split apart, but completely unrelated code ends up combined in a single method. This makes it too easy to introduce bugs and inconsistencies.

In many cases it’s not possible to break these components into smaller ones because the stateful logic is all over the place. It’s also difficult to test them. This is one of the reasons many people prefer to combine React with a separate state management library. However, that often introduces too much abstraction, requires you to jump between different files, and makes reusing components more difficult.

To solve this, Hooks let you split one component into smaller functions based on what pieces are related (such as setting up a subscription or fetching data) , rather than forcing a split based on lifecycle methods. You may also opt into managing the component’s local state with a reducer to make it more predictable.

We’ll discuss this more in Using the Effect Hook.

Classes confuse both people and machines

In addition to making code reuse and code organization more difficult, we’ve found that classes can be a large barrier to learning React. You have to understand how this works in JavaScript, which is very different from how it works in most languages. You have to remember to bind the event handlers. Without ES2022 public class fields, the code is very verbose. People can understand props, state, and top-down data flow perfectly well but still struggle with classes. The distinction between function and class components in React and when to use each one leads to disagreements even between experienced React developers.

Additionally, React has been out for about five years, and we want to make sure it stays relevant in the next five years. As Svelte, Angular, Glimmer, and others show, ahead-of-time compilation of components has a lot of future potential. Especially if it’s not limited to templates. Recently, we’ve been experimenting with component folding using Prepack, and we’ve seen promising early results. However, we found that class components can encourage unintentional patterns that make these optimizations fall back to a slower path. Classes present issues for today’s tools, too. For example, classes don’t minify very well, and they make hot reloading flaky and unreliable. We want to present an API that makes it more likely for code to stay on the optimizable path.

To solve these problems, Hooks let you use more of React’s features without classes. Conceptually, React components have always been closer to functions. Hooks embrace functions, but without sacrificing the practical spirit of React. Hooks provide access to imperative escape hatches and don’t require you to learn complex functional or reactive programming techniques.

Examples

Hooks at a Glance is a good place to start learning Hooks.

Gradual Adoption Strategy

TLDR: There are no plans to remove classes from React.

We know that React developers are focused on shipping products and don’t have time to look into every new API that’s being released. Hooks are very new, and it might be better to wait for more examples and tutorials before considering learning or adopting them.

We also understand that the bar for adding a new primitive to React is extremely high. For curious readers, we have prepared a detailed RFC that dives into the motivation with more details, and provides extra perspective on the specific design decisions and related prior art.

Crucially, Hooks work side-by-side with existing code so you can adopt them gradually. There is no rush to migrate to Hooks. We recommend avoiding any “big rewrites”, especially for existing, complex class components. It takes a bit of a mind shift to start “thinking in Hooks”. In our experience, it’s best to practice using Hooks in new and non-critical components first, and ensure that everybody on your team feels comfortable with them. After you give Hooks a try, please feel free to send us feedback, positive or negative.

We intend for Hooks to cover all existing use cases for classes, but we will keep supporting class components for the foreseeable future. At Facebook, we have tens of thousands of components written as classes, and we have absolutely no plans to rewrite them. Instead, we are starting to use Hooks in the new code side by side with classes.

Frequently Asked Questions

We’ve prepared a Hooks FAQ page that answers the most common questions about Hooks.

Next Steps

By the end of this page, you should have a rough idea of what problems Hooks are solving, but many details are probably unclear. Don’t worry! Let’s now go to the next page where we start learning about Hooks by example.

Hooks are a new addition in React 16.8. They let you use state and other React features without writing a class.

Hooks are backwards-compatible. This page provides an overview of Hooks for experienced React users. This is a fast-paced overview. If you get confused, look for a yellow box like this:

Detailed Explanation

Read the Motivation to learn why we’re introducing Hooks to React.

↑↑↑ Each section ends with a yellow box like this. They link to detailed explanations.

📌 State Hook

This example renders a counter. When you click the button, it increments the value:

import React, { useState } from 'react';
function Example() {
  // Declare a new state variable, which we'll call "count"  const [count, setCount] = useState(0);
  return (
    <div>
      <p>You clicked {count} times</p>
      <button onClick={() => setCount(count + 1)}>
        Click me
      </button>
    </div>
  );
}

Here, useState is a Hook (we’ll talk about what this means in a moment). We call it inside a function component to add some local state to it. React will preserve this state between re-renders. useState returns a pair: the current state value and a function that lets you update it. You can call this function from an event handler or somewhere else. It’s similar to this.setState in a class, except it doesn’t merge the old and new state together. (We’ll show an example comparing useState to this.state in Using the State Hook.)

The only argument to useState is the initial state. In the example above, it is 0 because our counter starts from zero. Note that unlike this.state , the state here doesn’t have to be an object — although it can be if you want. The initial state argument is only used during the first render.

Declaring multiple state variables

You can use the State Hook more than once in a single component:

function ExampleWithManyStates() {
  // Declare multiple state variables!
  const [age, setAge] = useState(42);
  const [fruit, setFruit] = useState('banana');
  const [todos, setTodos] = useState([{ text: 'Learn Hooks' }]);
  // ...
}

The array destructuring syntax lets us give different names to the state variables we declared by calling useState . These names aren’t a part of the useState API. Instead, React assumes that if you call useState many times, you do it in the same order during every render. We’ll come back to why this works and when this is useful later.

But what is a Hook?

Hooks are functions that let you “hook into” React state and lifecycle features from function components. Hooks don’t work inside classes — they let you use React without classes. (We don’t recommend rewriting your existing components overnight but you can start using Hooks in the new ones if you’d like.)

React provides a few built-in Hooks like useState . You can also create your own Hooks to reuse stateful behavior between different components. We’ll look at the built-in Hooks first.

Detailed Explanation

You can learn more about the State Hook on a dedicated page: Using the State Hook.

⚡️ Effect Hook

You’ve likely performed data fetching, subscriptions, or manually changing the DOM from React components before. We call these operations “side effects” (or “effects” for short) because they can affect other components and can’t be done during rendering.

The Effect Hook, useEffect , adds the ability to perform side effects from a function component. It serves the same purpose as componentDidMount , componentDidUpdate , and componentWillUnmount in React classes, but unified into a single API. (We’ll show examples comparing useEffect to these methods in Using the Effect Hook.)

For example, this component sets the document title after React updates the DOM:

import React, { useState, useEffect } from 'react';
function Example() {
  const [count, setCount] = useState(0);

  // Similar to componentDidMount and componentDidUpdate:  useEffect(() => {    // Update the document title using the browser API    document.title = `You clicked ${count} times`;  });
  return (
    <div>
      <p>You clicked {count} times</p>
      <button onClick={() => setCount(count + 1)}>
        Click me
      </button>
    </div>
  );
}

When you call useEffect , you’re telling React to run your “effect” function after flushing changes to the DOM. Effects are declared inside the component so they have access to its props and state. By default, React runs the effects after every render — including the first render. (We’ll talk more about how this compares to class lifecycles in Using the Effect Hook.)

Effects may also optionally specify how to “clean up” after them by returning a function. For example, this component uses an effect to subscribe to a friend’s online status, and cleans up by unsubscribing from it:

import React, { useState, useEffect } from 'react';

function FriendStatus(props) {
  const [isOnline, setIsOnline] = useState(null);

  function handleStatusChange(status) {
    setIsOnline(status.isOnline);
  }

  useEffect(() => {    ChatAPI.subscribeToFriendStatus(props.friend.id, handleStatusChange);    return () => {      ChatAPI.unsubscribeFromFriendStatus(props.friend.id, handleStatusChange);    };  });
  if (isOnline === null) {
    return 'Loading...';
  }
  return isOnline ? 'Online' : 'Offline';
}

In this example, React would unsubscribe from our ChatAPI when the component unmounts, as well as before re-running the effect due to a subsequent render. (If you want, there’s a way to tell React to skip re-subscribing if the props.friend.id we passed to ChatAPI didn’t change.)

Just like with useState , you can use more than a single effect in a component:

function FriendStatusWithCounter(props) {
  const [count, setCount] = useState(0);
  useEffect(() => {    document.title = `You clicked ${count} times`;
  });

  const [isOnline, setIsOnline] = useState(null);
  useEffect(() => {    ChatAPI.subscribeToFriendStatus(props.friend.id, handleStatusChange);
    return () => {
      ChatAPI.unsubscribeFromFriendStatus(props.friend.id, handleStatusChange);
    };
  });

  function handleStatusChange(status) {
    setIsOnline(status.isOnline);
  }
  // ...

Hooks let you organize side effects in a component by what pieces are related (such as adding and removing a subscription), rather than forcing a split based on lifecycle methods.

Detailed Explanation

You can learn more about useEffect on a dedicated page: Using the Effect Hook.

✌️ Rules of Hooks

Hooks are JavaScript functions, but they impose two additional rules:

• Only call Hooks at the top level . Don’t call Hooks inside loops, conditions, or nested functions.


• Only call Hooks from React function components . Don’t call Hooks from regular JavaScript functions. (There is just one other valid place to call Hooks — your own custom Hooks. We’ll learn about them in a moment.)

We provide a linter plugin to enforce these rules automatically. We understand these rules might seem limiting or confusing at first, but they are essential to making Hooks work well.

Detailed Explanation

You can learn more about these rules on a dedicated page: Rules of Hooks.

💡 Building Your Own Hooks

Sometimes, we want to reuse some stateful logic between components. Traditionally, there were two popular solutions to this problem: higher-order components and render props. Custom Hooks let you do this, but without adding more components to your tree.

Earlier on this page, we introduced a FriendStatus component that calls the useState and useEffect Hooks to subscribe to a friend’s online status. Let’s say we also want to reuse this subscription logic in another component.

First, we’ll extract this logic into a custom Hook called useFriendStatus :

import React, { useState, useEffect } from 'react';

function useFriendStatus(friendID) {  const [isOnline, setIsOnline] = useState(null);

  function handleStatusChange(status) {
    setIsOnline(status.isOnline);
  }

  useEffect(() => {
    ChatAPI.subscribeToFriendStatus(friendID, handleStatusChange);
    return () => {
      ChatAPI.unsubscribeFromFriendStatus(friendID, handleStatusChange);
    };
  });

  return isOnline;
}

It takes friendID as an argument, and returns whether our friend is online.

Now we can use it from both components:

function FriendStatus(props) {
  const isOnline = useFriendStatus(props.friend.id);
  if (isOnline === null) {
    return 'Loading...';
  }
  return isOnline ? 'Online' : 'Offline';
}

function FriendListItem(props) {
  const isOnline = useFriendStatus(props.friend.id);
  return (
    <li style={{ color: isOnline ? 'green' : 'black' }}>
      {props.friend.name}
    </li>
  );
}

The state of each component is completely independent. Hooks are a way to reuse stateful logic , not state itself. In fact, each call to a Hook has a completely isolated state — so you can even use the same custom Hook twice in one component.

Custom Hooks are more of a convention than a feature. If a function’s name starts with ” use ” and it calls other Hooks, we say it is a custom Hook. The useSomething naming convention is how our linter plugin is able to find bugs in the code using Hooks.

You can write custom Hooks that cover a wide range of use cases like form handling, animation, declarative subscriptions, timers, and probably many more we haven’t considered. We are excited to see what custom Hooks the React community will come up with.

Detailed Explanation

You can learn more about custom Hooks on a dedicated page: Building Your Own Hooks.

🔌 Other Hooks

There are a few less commonly used built-in Hooks that you might find useful. For example, useContext lets you subscribe to React context without introducing nesting:

function Example() {
  const locale = useContext(LocaleContext);  const theme = useContext(ThemeContext);  // ...
}

And useReducer lets you manage local state of complex components with a reducer:

function Todos() {
  const [todos, dispatch] = useReducer(todosReducer);  // ...

Detailed Explanation

You can learn more about all the built-in Hooks on a dedicated page: Hooks API Reference.

Next Steps

Phew, that was fast! If some things didn’t quite make sense or you’d like to learn more in detail, you can read the next pages, starting with the State Hook documentation.

You can also check out the Hooks API reference and the Hooks FAQ.

Finally, don’t miss the introduction page which explains why we’re adding Hooks and how we’ll start using them side by side with classes — without rewriting our apps.

Hooks are a new addition in React 16.8. They let you use state and other React features without writing a class.

The introduction page used this example to get familiar with Hooks:

import React, { useState } from 'react';

function Example() {
  // Declare a new state variable, which we'll call "count"  const [count, setCount] = useState(0);
  return (
    <div>
      <p>You clicked {count} times</p>
      <button onClick={() => setCount(count + 1)}>
        Click me
      </button>
    </div>
  );
}

We’ll start learning about Hooks by comparing this code to an equivalent class example.

Equivalent Class Example

If you used classes in React before, this code should look familiar:

class Example extends React.Component {
  constructor(props) {
    super(props);
    this.state = {
      count: 0
    };
  }

  render() {
    return (
      <div>
        <p>You clicked {this.state.count} times</p>
        <button onClick={() => this.setState({ count: this.state.count + 1 })}>
          Click me
        </button>
      </div>
    );
  }
}

The state starts as { count: 0 } , and we increment state.count when the user clicks a button by calling this.setState() . We’ll use snippets from this class throughout the page.

Note

You might be wondering why we’re using a counter here instead of a more realistic example. This is to help us focus on the API while we’re still making our first steps with Hooks.

Hooks and Function Components

As a reminder, function components in React look like this:

const Example = (props) => {
  // You can use Hooks here!
  return <div />;
}

or this:

function Example(props) {
  // You can use Hooks here!
  return <div />;
}

You might have previously known these as “stateless components”. We’re now introducing the ability to use React state from these, so we prefer the name “function components”.

Hooks don’t work inside classes. But you can use them instead of writing classes.

What’s a Hook?

Our new example starts by importing the useState Hook from React:

import React, { useState } from 'react';
function Example() {
  // ...
}

What is a Hook? A Hook is a special function that lets you “hook into” React features. For example, useState is a Hook that lets you add React state to function components. We’ll learn other Hooks later.

When would I use a Hook? If you write a function component and realize you need to add some state to it, previously you had to convert it to a class. Now you can use a Hook inside the existing function component. We’re going to do that right now!

Note:

There are some special rules about where you can and can’t use Hooks within a component. We’ll learn them in Rules of Hooks.

Declaring a State Variable

In a class, we initialize the count state to 0 by setting this.state to { count: 0 } in the constructor:

class Example extends React.Component {
  constructor(props) {
    super(props);
    this.state = {      count: 0    };  }

In a function component, we have no this , so we can’t assign or read this.state . Instead, we call the useState Hook directly inside our component:

import React, { useState } from 'react';

function Example() {
  // Declare a new state variable, which we'll call "count"  const [count, setCount] = useState(0);

What does calling useState do? It declares a “state variable”. Our variable is called count but we could call it anything else, like banana . This is a way to “preserve” some values between the function calls — useState is a new way to use the exact same capabilities that this.state provides in a class. Normally, variables “disappear” when the function exits but state variables are preserved by React.

What do we pass to useState as an argument? The only argument to the useState() Hook is the initial state. Unlike with classes, the state doesn’t have to be an object. We can keep a number or a string if that’s all we need. In our example, we just want a number for how many times the user clicked, so pass 0 as initial state for our variable. (If we wanted to store two different values in state, we would call useState() twice.)

What does useState return? It returns a pair of values: the current state and a function that updates it. This is why we write const [count, setCount] = useState() . This is similar to this.state.count and this.setState in a class, except you get them in a pair. If you’re not familiar with the syntax we used, we’ll come back to it at the bottom of this page.

Now that we know what the useState Hook does, our example should make more sense:

import React, { useState } from 'react';

function Example() {
  // Declare a new state variable, which we'll call "count"  const [count, setCount] = useState(0);

We declare a state variable called count , and set it to 0 . React will remember its current value between re-renders, and provide the most recent one to our function. If we want to update the current count , we can call setCount .

Note

You might be wondering: why is useState not named createState instead?

“Create” wouldn’t be quite accurate because the state is only created the first time our component renders. During the next renders, useState gives us the current state. Otherwise it wouldn’t be “state” at all! There’s also a reason why Hook names always start with use . We’ll learn why later in the Rules of Hooks.

Reading State

When we want to display the current count in a class, we read this.state.count :

  <p>You clicked {this.state.count} times</p>

In a function, we can use count directly:

  <p>You clicked {count} times</p>

Updating State

In a class, we need to call this.setState() to update the count state:

  <button onClick={() => this.setState({ count: this.state.count + 1 })}>    Click me
  </button>

In a function, we already have setCount and count as variables so we don’t need this :

  <button onClick={() => setCount(count + 1)}>    Click me
  </button>

Recap

Let’s now recap what we learned line by line and check our understanding.

 1:  import React, { useState } from 'react'; 2:
 3:  function Example() {
 4:    const [count, setCount] = useState(0); 5:
 6:    return (
 7:      <div>
 8:        <p>You clicked {count} times</p>
 9:        <button onClick={() => setCount(count + 1)}>10:         Click me
11:        </button>
12:      </div>
13:    );
14:  }

• Line 1: We import the useState Hook from React. It lets us keep local state in a function component.


• Line 4: Inside the Example component, we declare a new state variable by calling the useState Hook. It returns a pair of values, to which we give names. We’re calling our variable count because it holds the number of button clicks. We initialize it to zero by passing 0 as the only useState argument. The second returned item is itself a function. It lets us update the count so we’ll name it setCount .


• Line 9: When the user clicks, we call setCount with a new value. React will then re-render the Example component, passing the new count value to it.

This might seem like a lot to take in at first. Don’t rush it! If you’re lost in the explanation, look at the code above again and try to read it from top to bottom. We promise that once you try to “forget” how state works in classes, and look at this code with fresh eyes, it will make sense.

Tip: What Do Square Brackets Mean?

You might have noticed the square brackets when we declare a state variable:

  const [count, setCount] = useState(0);

The names on the left aren’t a part of the React API. You can name your own state variables:

  const [fruit, setFruit] = useState('banana');

This JavaScript syntax is called “array destructuring”. It means that we’re making two new variables fruit and setFruit , where fruit is set to the first value returned by useState , and setFruit is the second. It is equivalent to this code:

  var fruitStateVariable = useState('banana'); // Returns a pair
  var fruit = fruitStateVariable[0]; // First item in a pair
  var setFruit = fruitStateVariable[1]; // Second item in a pair

When we declare a state variable with useState , it returns a pair — an array with two items. The first item is the current value, and the second is a function that lets us update it. Using [0] and [1] to access them is a bit confusing because they have a specific meaning. This is why we use array destructuring instead.

Note

You might be curious how React knows which component useState corresponds to since we’re not passing anything like this back to React. We’ll answer this question and many others in the FAQ section.

Tip: Using Multiple State Variables

Declaring state variables as a pair of [something, setSomething] is also handy because it lets us give different names to different state variables if we want to use more than one:

function ExampleWithManyStates() {
  // Declare multiple state variables!
  const [age, setAge] = useState(42);
  const [fruit, setFruit] = useState('banana');
  const [todos, setTodos] = useState([{ text: 'Learn Hooks' }]);

In the above component, we have age , fruit , and todos as local variables, and we can update them individually:

  function handleOrangeClick() {
    // Similar to this.setState({ fruit: 'orange' })
    setFruit('orange');
  }

You don’t have to use many state variables. State variables can hold objects and arrays just fine, so you can still group related data together. However, unlike this.setState in a class, updating a state variable always replaces it instead of merging it.

We provide more recommendations on splitting independent state variables in the FAQ.

Next Steps

On this page we’ve learned about one of the Hooks provided by React, called useState . We’re also sometimes going to refer to it as the “State Hook”. It lets us add local state to React function components — which we did for the first time ever!

We also learned a little bit more about what Hooks are. Hooks are functions that let you “hook into” React features from function components. Their names always start with use , and there are more Hooks we haven’t seen yet.

Now let’s continue by learning the next Hook: useEffect . It lets you perform side effects in components, and is similar to lifecycle methods in classes.