Overview

TanStack Router is a router for building React applications. Some of its features include:

100% inferred TypeScript support
Typesafe navigation
Nested Routing and layout routes
Built-in Route Loaders w/ SWR Caching
Designed for client-side data caches (TanStack Query, SWR, etc.)
Automatic route prefetching
Asynchronous route elements and error boundaries
File-based Route Generation
Typesafe JSON-first Search Params state management APIs
Path and Search Parameter Schema Validation
Search Param Navigation APIs
Custom Search Param parser/serializer support
Search param middleware
Route matching/loading middleware

To get started quickly, head to the next page. For a more lengthy explanation, buckle up while I bring you up to speed!

"A Fork in the Route"

Using a router to build applications is widely regarded as a must-have and is usually one of the first choices you’ll make in your tech stack.

So, why should you choose TanStack Router over another router?

To answer this question, we need to look at the other options in the space. There are many if you look hard enough, but in my experience, only a couple are worth exploring seriously:

Next.js - Widely regarded as the de facto framework for starting a new React project, it’s laser focused on performance, workflow, and bleeding edge technology. Its APIs and abstractions are powerful, but can sometimes come across as non-standard. Its extremely fast growth and adoption in the industry has resulted in a featured packed experience, but not at the expense of feeling overwhelming and sometimes bloated.
Remix / React Router - A full-stack framework based on the historically successful React Router offers a similarly powerful developer and user experience, with APIs and vision based firmly on web standards like Request/Response and a focus on running anywhere JS can run. Many of its APIs and abstractions are wonderfully designed and were inspiration for more than a few TanStack Router APIs. That said, its rigid design, bolted-on type safety and sometimes strict over-adherence to platform APIs can leave some developers wanting more.

Both of these frameworks (and their routers) are great, and I can personally attest that both are very good solutions for building React applications. My experience has also taught me that these solutions could also be much better, especially around the actual routing APIs that are available to developers to make their apps faster, easier, and more enjoyable to work with.

It's probably no surprise at this point that picking a router is so important that it is often tied 1-to-1 with your choice of framework, since most frameworks rely on a specific router.

Does this mean that TanStack Router is a framework?

TanStack Router itself is not a "framework" in the traditional sense, since it doesn't address a few other common full-stack concerns. However TanStack Router has been designed to be upgradable to a full-stack framework when used in conjunction with other tools that address bundling, deployments, and server-side-specific functionality. This is why we are currently developing TanStack Start, a full-stack framework that is built on top of TanStack Router and tools like Vinxi, Nitro, and Vite.

For a deeper dive on the history of TanStack Router, feel free to read TanStack Router's History.

Why TanStack Router?

TanStack Router delivers on the same fundamental expectations as other routers that you’ve come to expect:

Nested routes, layout routes, grouped routes
File-based Routing
Parallel data loading
Prefetching
URL Path Params
Error Boundaries and Handling
SSR
Route Masking

And it also delivers some new features that raise the bar:

100% inferred TypeScript support
Typesafe navigation
Built-in SWR Caching for loaders
Designed for client-side data caches (TanStack Query, SWR, etc.)
Typesafe JSON-first Search Params state management APIs
Path and Search Parameter Schema Validation
Search Parameter Navigation APIs
Custom Search Param parser/serializer support
Search param middleware
Inherited Route Context
Mixed file-based and code-based routing

Let’s dive into some of the more important ones in more detail!

100% Inferred TypeScript Support

Everything these days is written “in Typescript” or at the very least offers type definitions that are veneered over runtime functionality, but too few packages in the ecosystem actually design their APIs with TypeScript in mind. So while I’m pleased that your router is auto-completing your option fields and catching a few property/method typos here and there, there is much more to be had.

TanStack Router is fully aware of all of your routes and their configuration at any given point in your code. This includes the path, path params, search params, context, and any other configuration you’ve provided. Ultimately this means that you can navigate to any route in your app with 100% type safety and confidence that your link or navigate call will succeed.
TanStack Router provides lossless type-inference. It uses countless generic type parameters to enforce and propagate any type information you give it throughout the rest its API and ultimately your app. No other router offers this level of type safety and developer confidence.

What does all of that mean for you?

Faster feature development with auto-completion and type hints
Safer and faster refactors
Confidence that your code will work as expected

1st Class Search Parameters

Search parameters are often an afterthought, treated like a black box of strings (or string) that you can parse and update, but not much else. Existing solutions are not type-safe either, adding to the caution that is required to deal with them. Even the most "modern" frameworks and routers and leave it up to you to figure out how to manage this state. Sometimes they'll parse the search string into an object for you, or sometimes you're left to do it yourself with URLSearchParams.

Let's step back and remember that search params are the most powerful state manager in your entire application. They are global, serializable, bookmarkable, and shareable making them the perfect place to store any kind of state that needs to survive a page refresh or a social share.

To live up to that responsibility, search parameters are a first-class citizen in TanStack Router. While still based on standard URLSearchParams, TanStack Router uses a powerful parser/serializer to manage deeper and more complex data structures in your search params, all while keeping them type-safe and easy to work with.

It's like having useState right in the URL!

Search parameters are:

Automatically parsed and serialized as JSON
Validated and typed
Inherited from parent routes
Accessible in loaders, components, and hooks
Easily modified with the useSearch hook, Link, navigate, and router.navigate APIs
Customizable with a custom search filters and middleware
Subscribed via fine-grained search param selectors for efficient re-renders

Once you start using TanStack Router's search parameters, you'll wonder how you ever lived without them.

Built-In Caching and Friendly Data Loading

Data loading is a critical part of any application and while most existing routers offer some form of critical data loading APIs, they often fall short when it comes to caching and data lifecycle management. Existing solutions suffer from a few common problems:

No caching at all. Data is always fresh, but your users are left waiting for frequently accessed data to load over and over again.
Overly-aggressive caching. Data is cached for too long, leading to stale data and a poor user experience.
Blunt invalidation strategies and APIs. Data may be invalidated too often, leading to unnecessary network requests and wasted resources, or you may not have any fine-grained control over when data is invalidated at all.

TanStack Router solves these problems with a two-prong approach to caching and data loading:

Built-in Cache

TanStack Router provides a light-weight built-in caching layer that works seamlessly with the Router. This caching layer is loosely based on TanStack Query, but with fewer features and a much smaller API surface area. Like TanStack Query, sane but powerful defaults guarantee that your data is cached for reuse, invalidated when necessary, and garbage collected when not in use. It also provides a simple API for invalidating the cache manually when needed.

Flexible & Powerful Data Lifecycle APIs

TanStack Router is designed with a flexible and powerful data loading API that more easily integrates with existing data fetching libraries like TanStack Query, SWR, Apollo, Relay, or even your own custom data fetching solution. Configurable APIs like context, beforeLoad, loaderDeps and loader work in unison to make it easy to define declarative data dependencies, prefetch data, and manage the lifecycle of an external data source with ease.

Inherited Route Context

TanStack Router's router and route context is a powerful feature that allows you to define context that is specific to a route which is then inherited by all child routes. Even the router and root routes themselves can provide context. Context can be built up both synchronously and asynchronously, and can be used to share data, configuration, or even functions between routes and route configurations. This is especially useful for scenarios like:

Authentication and Authorization
Hybrid SSR/CSR data fetching and preloading
Theming
Singletons and global utilities
Curried or partial application across preloading, loading, and rendering stages

Also, what would route context be if it weren't type-safe? TanStack Router's route context is fully type-safe and inferred at zero cost to you.

File-based and/or Code-Based Routing

TanStack Router supports both file-based and code-based routing at the same time. This flexibility allows you to choose the approach that best fits your project's needs.

TanStack Router's file-based routing approach is uniquely user-facing. Route configuration is generated for you either by the Vite plugin or TanStack Router CLI, leaving the usage of said generated code up to you! This means that you're always in total control of your routes and router, even if you use file-based routing.

Acknowledgements

TanStack Router builds on concepts and patterns popularized by many other OSS projects, including:

We acknowledge the investment, risk and research that went into their development, but are excited to push the bar they have set even higher.

Let's go!

Enough overview, there's so much more to do with TanStack Router. Hit that next button and let's get started!