react-head

Asynchronous SSR-ready Document Head management for React 16.3+

Motivation

This module allows you to define document.head tags anywhere in your component hiearchy. The motivations are similar to react-helmet in that you may only have the information for certain tags contextually deep in your component hiearchy. There are no dependencies (it does not use react-side-effects) and it should work fine with asynchronous rendering; the only requirement is React 16.3+.

Installation

npm i react-head

How it works

On the server, you wrap your App in <HeadProvider /> with a given headTags[] array
Then call renderToString(headTags) and include in the <head /> block of your server template
To insert head tags within your app, just render <HeadTag /> components as often as needed.

On the server, the tags are collected in the headTags[] array, and then on the client the server-generated tags are removed in favor of the client-rendered tags so that SPAs still work as expected (e.g. in cases where subsequent pageloads need to change the head tags).

You can view a fully working sample app in the /example folder.

Server setup

Wrap your app with <HeadProvider /> on the server with a given headTags[] array to pass down as part of your server-rendered payload.

import * as React from 'react';
import { renderToString } from 'react-dom/server';
import { HeadProvider } from 'react-head';
import App from './App';

// ... within the context of a request ...

const context = {};
const headTags = [];
const app = renderToString(
  <HeadProvider headTags={headTags}>
    <App />
  </HeadProvider>
);

res.send(`
  <!doctype html>
    <head>
      ${renderToString(headTags)}
    </head>
    <body>
      <div id="root">${app}</div>
    </body>
  </html>
`)

Client setup

There is nothing special required on the client, just render <HeadTag /> components whenever you want to inject a tag in the <head />.

import * as React from 'react';
import { HeadTag } from 'react-head';

const App = () => (
   <div className="Home">
      <HeadTag tag="title">Title of page</HeadTag>
      <HeadTag tag="link" rel="canonical" content="http://jeremygayed.com/" />
      <HeadTag tag="meta" name="example" content="whatever" />
      // ...
  </div>
)

Usage

The following aliases are also available for use (just convenience components that pre-fill the tag prop in <HeadTag />):

import { HeadTag, Title, Style, Meta, Link } from 'react-head';

Contributing

Please follow the contributing docs

arkist / react-head