React-Router External link

Question

Here's a one-liner for using React Router to redirect to an external link:

<Route path='/privacy-policy' component={() => { 
     window.location.href = 'https://example.com/1234'; 
     return null;
}}/>

It uses React pure component concept to reduce the component's code to a single function that, instead of rendering anything, redirects browser to an external URL.

Works both on React Router 3 and 4.

With Link component of react-router you can do that. In the "to" prop you can specify 3 types of data:

• a string: A string representation of the Link location, created by concatenating the location’s pathname, search, and hash properties.
• an object: An object that can have any of the following properties:
  • pathname: A string representing the path to link to.
  • search: A string representation of query parameters.
  • hash: A hash to put in the URL, e.g. #a-hash.
  • state: State to persist to the location.
• a function: A function to which current location is passed as an argument and which should return location representation as a string or as an object

For your example (external link):

https://example.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/123456789-Privacy-Policies

You can do the following:

<Link to={{ pathname: "https://example.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/123456789-Privacy-Policies" }} target="_blank" />

You can also pass props you’d like to be on the such as a title, id, className, etc.

There is no need to use <Link /> component from react-router.

If you want to go to external link use an anchor tag.

<a target="_blank" href="https://meetflo.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/230425728-Privacy-Policies">Policies</a>

It doesn't need to request react router. This action can be done natively and it is provided by the browser.

just use window.location

class RedirectPage extends React.Component {
  componentDidMount(){
    window.location.replace('https://www.google.com')
  }
}

also, if you want to open it in a new tab:

window.open('https://www.google.com', '_blank');

I actually ended up building my own Component. <Redirect> It takes info from the react-router element so I can keep it in my routes. Such as:

<Route
  path="/privacy-policy"
  component={ Redirect }
  loc="https://meetflo.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/230425728-Privacy-Policies"
  />

Here is my component incase-anyone is curious:

import React, { Component } from "react";

export class Redirect extends Component {
  constructor( props ){
    super();
    this.state = { ...props };
  }
  componentWillMount(){
    window.location = this.state.route.loc;
  }
  render(){
    return (<section>Redirecting...</section>);
  }
}

export default Redirect;

EDIT -- NOTE: This is with react-router: 3.0.5, it is not so simple in 4.x