Contributing to React Router

Thanks for contributing, you rock!

When it comes to open source, there are many different kinds of contributions that can be made, all of which are valuable. Here are a few guidelines that should help you as you prepare your contribution.

Open Governance Model

Before going any further, please read the Open Governance blog post and document for information on how we handle bugs/issues/feature proposals in React Router.

Setup

Before you can contribute to the codebase, you will need to fork the repo. This will look a bit different depending on what type of contribution you are making:

• All new features, bug-fixes, documentation updates, or anything that touches react-router code should be branched off of and merged into the main branch

The following steps will get you set up to contribute changes to this repo:

1. Fork the repo (click the Fork button at the top right of this page)

2. Clone your fork locally

   # in a terminal, cd to parent directory where you want your clone to be, then
   git clone https://github.com/<your_github_username>/react-router.git
   cd react-router

3. Install dependencies and build. React Router uses pnpm, so you should too. If you install using npm, unnecessary package-lock.json files will be generated.

Think You Found a Bug?

Please conform to the issue template and provide a minimal and runnable reproduction. Best is a pull request with a failing test. Next best is a link to StackBlitz, CodeSandbox, or GitHub repository that illustrates the bug.

Issue Not Getting Attention?

If you need a bug fixed and nobody is fixing it, your best bet is to provide a fix for it and make a pull request. Open source code belongs to all of us, and it's all of our responsibility to push it forward.

Proposing New or Changed API?

⚠️ Please do not start with a PR for a new feature.

New features need to go through the process outlined in the Open Governance Model and can be started by opening a Proposal Discussion on GitHub. Please provide thoughtful comments and some sample code that show what you'd like to do with React Router in your app. It helps the conversation if you can show us how you're limited by the current API first before jumping to a conclusion about what needs to be changed and/or added.

We have learned by experience that small APIs are usually better, so we may be a little reluctant to add something new unless there's an obvious limitation with the current API. That being said, we are always anxious to hear about cases that we just haven't considered before, so please don't be shy! :)

Adding an Example?

Examples can be added directly to the main branch. Create a branch off of your local clone of main. Once you've finished, create a pull request and outline your example.

Making a Pull Request?

Pull requests need only the approval of two or more collaborators to be merged; when the PR author is a collaborator, that counts as one.

Tests

All commits that fix bugs or add features need one or more tests.

Change Files

In order to facilitate release notes generation, every PR with a user-facing impact should include one or more change files. You can generate these vis pnpm run changes:add (requires node 24+).

This tool will generate change files in the relevant packages/<package>/.changes/ directories. Change files are markdown files with a short description of the change. They should be named using the format <type>.<short-description>.md where type is either patch, minor, major, or unstable. For example:

patch.fix-fetcher-redirects.md
minor.add-some-new-api.md
major.require-node-24.md
unstable.update-unstable-api.md

License

By contributing to React Router, you agree that your contributions will be licensed under the MIT License.

Docs + Examples

All commits that change or add to the API must be done in a pull request that also updates all relevant examples and docs.

Documentation is located in the docs directory. Once changes make their way into the main branch, they will automatically be published to the docs site.

If you want to preview how the changes will look on the docs site, clone the react-router-website repository and follow the instructions in README.md to view your changes locally.

Development

Packages

React Router uses a monorepo to host code for multiple packages. These packages live in the packages directory.

We use pnpm workspaces to manage installation of dependencies and running various scripts. To get everything installed, make sure you have pnpm installed, and then run pnpm install from the repo root.

Building

Calling pnpm build from the root directory will run the build, which should take only a few seconds. It's important to build all the packages together because the individual packages have dependencies on one another.

Testing

Before running the tests, you need to run a build. After you build, running pnpm test from the root directory will run every package's tests. If you want to run tests for a specific package, use pnpm test packages/<package-name>/:

# Test all packages
pnpm test

# Test only @react-router/dev
pnpm test packages/react-router-dev/

Repository Branching

This repo maintains separate branches for different purposes. They will look something like this:

- main   > the most recent release and current docs
- v6     > the most recent code for a specific major release

There may be other branches for various features and experimentation, but all of the magic happens from these branches.

Releases

Please refer to DEVELOPMENT.md for an outline of the release process.