Writing Authenticated Route Component in React Redux

How to write an Authenticated Route component which will redirect to Sign In Page if a user isn’t authenticated and once authentication is complete, it’ll redirect them back to the same page, this is a problem most new React developers face. Today we learn to do just that.

But before we begin, lets clear out some assumptions:

• This is not a beginner react-redux authentication tutorial, we assume you already have an authentication mechanism set up.
• The Redux association is just to get the “authenticated”(bool) state, and you can use any state management you like.
• We are using React Router v4
• You may need to modify it according to your project.

Now that, that’s out of the way lets begin by creating the most important part, the AuthenticatedRoute component.

Creating AuthenticatedRoute Component

AuthenticatedRoute component is a component which takes the props of Route and an additional boolean prop, authenticated, which determines if the Component is to be rendered or the user needs to be redirected.

import React from "react";
import {Route, Redirect} from "react-router-dom";

export default function AuthenticatedRoute({
                                               component: Component,
                                               authenticated,
                                               ...rest
                                           }) {
    return (
        <Route
            {...rest}
            render={props =>
                authenticated === true ? (
                    <Component {...props} {...rest} />
                ) : (
                    <Redirect to={`/signin?redirectTo=${props.match.path}`}/>
                )
            }
        />
    );
}

It also stores the actual path as a parameter in the sign in path /signin?redirectTo=<path> so that when the user signs in it’ll redirect to that path.

Redirecting to the URL Param after Sign In

To redirect to the param that we set, we need to first edit the signinUser(username, password) action, by adding a third argument, redirect.

...

export function signinUser(username, password, redirect = '/'){
// Authentication Logic
...
}

we set a default value for the third argument so that in case no value is provided it’ll redirect to the home page. Now for the actual redirection.

export function signinUser(username, password, redirect = '/'){
    return function(dispatch){
        dispatch(authRequest);
            return axios.post(
                ...
            ).then((response) => {
                dispatch(authSuccess(response));
                // Redirect
                window.location = redirect;
            }).catch(error => {
                dispatch(authFailure(error));
            });
    }
}

Parsing the URL Parameter

To get the redirectTo param’s value from/signin?redirectTo=<path>, we need to install a package called query-string.

yarn add query-string

or

npm install query-string --save

now in our Sign In Container, in the function that handles Sign In request, we access the URL param and pass it to signinUser function.

...
import queryString from 'query-string';

class SignInContainer extends Component {
    handleSignIn(event) {
        event.preventDefault();
        const redirectTo = queryString.parse(this.props.location.search).redirectTo;
        this.props.actions.signinUser(this.state.data.username, this.state.data.password, redirectTo);
    }
}

Using AuthenticatedRoute in our Router

Now it’s time to use the AuthenticatedRoute Component, it’s very easy to do and works exactly like Route from react-router-dom. It only takes one extra parameter, authenticated, which is a boolean that determines if the user is authenticated or not.

...
import AuthenticatedRoute from './component/AuthenticatedRoute';

const store = configureStore();
const {sessionReducer: {session: {authenticated}}} = store.getState();

class App extends Component {
render() {
        return (
            <Provider store={store}>
                <Router>
                    <div>
                        <Switch>
                            <Route exact path='/signin' component={SignInPage}/>
                            <AuthenticatedRoute exact path='/' 
                                                component={HomePage}
                                                authenticate={authenticated}/>
                            ...
                        </Switch>
                    </div>
                </Router>
            </Provider>
        );
    }
}

And that’s it! We’re all set.