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Version: 8.x

Hello React Navigation

In a web browser, you can link to different pages using an anchor (<a>) tag. When the user clicks on a link, the URL is pushed to the browser history stack. When the user presses the back button, the browser pops the item from the top of the history stack, so the active page is now the previously visited page. React Native doesn't have a built-in idea of a global history stack like a web browser does -- this is where React Navigation enters the story.

React Navigation's native stack navigator provides a way for your app to transition between screens and manage navigation history. If your app uses only one stack navigator then it is conceptually similar to how a web browser handles navigation state - your app pushes and pops items from the navigation stack as users interact with it, and this results in the user seeing different screens. A key difference between how this works in a web browser and in React Navigation is that React Navigation's native stack navigator provides the gestures and animations that you would expect on Android and iOS when navigating between routes in the stack.

Let's start by demonstrating the most common navigator, createNativeStackNavigator.

Installing the native stack navigator library​

The libraries we've installed so far are the building blocks and shared foundations for navigators, and each navigator in React Navigation lives in its own library. To use the native stack navigator, we need to install @react-navigation/native-stack :

npm install @react-navigation/native-stack@next
info

@react-navigation/native-stack depends on react-native-screens and the other libraries that we installed in Getting started. If you haven't installed those yet, head over to that page and follow the installation instructions.

Installing the elements library​

The @react-navigation/elements library provides a set of components that are designed to work well with React Navigation. We'll use a few of these components such as Button in this guide. So let's install it first:

npm install @react-navigation/elements

Creating a native stack navigator​

createNativeStackNavigator is a function that takes a configuration object for the navigator including the list of screens to include.

createNativeStackScreen is a function that takes a configuration object for a screen, where the screen property is the component to render for that screen. A screen is a React Component that renders the content displayed by the navigator, or a nested navigator which we'll learn about later.

createStaticNavigation is a function that takes the navigator defined earlier and returns a component that can be rendered in the app. It's only called once in the app. Usually, we'd render the returned component at the root of our app, which is usually the component exported from App.js, App.tsx etc., or used with AppRegistry.registerComponent, Expo.registerRootComponent etc.

To create a basic native stack navigator with a single screen, we can add the following code in the entry file of our app (e.g., App.tsx, index.tsx etc.):

import * as React from 'react';
import { View, Text } from 'react-native';
import { createStaticNavigation } from '@react-navigation/native';
import {
  createNativeStackNavigator,
  createNativeStackScreen,
} from '@react-navigation/native-stack';

function HomeScreen() {
  return (
    <View style={{ flex: 1, alignItems: 'center', justifyContent: 'center' }}>
      <Text>Home Screen</Text>
    </View>
  );
}

const RootStack = createNativeStackNavigator({
  screens: {
    Home: createNativeStackScreen({
      screen: HomeScreen,
    }),
  },
});

const Navigation = createStaticNavigation(RootStack);

export default function App() {
  return <Navigation />;
}
Try on Snack
warning

In a typical React Native app, the createStaticNavigation function should be only used once in your app at the root.

Basic app using stack navigator

If you run this code, you will see a screen with an empty navigation bar and a grey content area containing your HomeScreen component (shown above). The styles you see for the navigation bar and the content area are the default configuration for a stack navigator, we'll learn how to configure those later.

tip

The casing of the route name doesn't matter -- you can use lowercase home or capitalized Home, it's up to you. We prefer capitalizing our route names.

Configuring the navigator​

All of the route configuration is specified as props to our navigator. We haven't passed any props to our navigator, so it just uses the default configuration.

Let's add a second screen to our native stack navigator and configure the Home screen to render first:

const RootStack = createNativeStackNavigator({
  initialRouteName: 'Home',
  screens: {
    Home: createNativeStackScreen({
      screen: HomeScreen,
    }),
    Details: createNativeStackScreen({
      screen: DetailsScreen,
    }),
  },
});
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Now our stack has two routes, a Home route and a Details route. A route can be specified by under the screens property. The name of the property under screens corresponds to the name of the route we will use to navigate, and the value corresponds to the component it'll render.

Here, the Home route corresponds to the HomeScreen component, and the Details route corresponds to the DetailsScreen component. The initial route for the stack is the Home route. Try changing it to Details and reload the app (React Native's Fast Refresh won't update changes from initialRouteName, as you might expect), notice that you will now see the Details screen. Then change it back to Home and reload once more.

Specifying options​

Each screen in the navigator can specify some options for the navigator, such as the title to render in the header.

To specify the options, we'll add an options property to the screen configuration:

const RootStack = createNativeStackNavigator({
  initialRouteName: 'Home',
  screens: {
    Home: createNativeStackScreen({
      screen: HomeScreen,
      options: {
        title: 'Overview',
      },
    }),
    Details: createNativeStackScreen({
      screen: DetailsScreen,
    }),
  },
});
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Sometimes we will want to specify the same options for all of the screens in the navigator. For that, we can add a screenOptions property to the configuration:

const RootStack = createNativeStackNavigator({
  initialRouteName: 'Home',
  screenOptions: {
    headerStyle: { backgroundColor: 'tomato' },
  },
  screens: {
    Home: createNativeStackScreen({
      screen: HomeScreen,
      options: {
        title: 'Overview',
      },
    }),
    Details: createNativeStackScreen({
      screen: DetailsScreen,
    }),
  },
});
Try on Snack

Passing additional props​

Passing additional props to a screen is not supported in the static API.

Setting up TypeScript​

If you're using TypeScript, you'll need to tell React Navigation about your root navigator - i.e., the navigator that contains all other navigators and is used at the root of your app.

To do this, you can declare a module augmentation for @react-navigation/core and extend the RootNavigator interface with the type of your root navigator:

type RootStackType = typeof RootStack;

declare module '@react-navigation/core' {
  interface RootNavigator extends RootStackType {}
}

In this example, RootStack is the root navigator we created earlier using createNativeStackNavigator. You can place this code just below the code where you created your root navigator.

Check out the Type checking with TypeScript guide for more details.

What's next?​

The natural question at this point is: "how do I go from the Home route to the Details route?". That is covered in the next section.

Summary​

  • React Native doesn't have a built-in API for navigation like a web browser does. React Navigation provides this for you, along with the iOS and Android gestures and animations to transition between screens.
  • createNativeStackNavigator is a function that takes the screens configuration and renders our content.
  • Each property under screens refers to the name of the route, and the value is the component to render for the route.
  • To specify what the initial route in a stack is, provide an initialRouteName option for the navigator.
  • To specify screen-specific options, we can specify an options property, and for common options, we can specify screenOptions.