How to add a dynamic title on your React app

March 25, 2017

LuisPa García

In this post, I'll show you how to create a simple component to add a dynamic title behavior on your web app.

Here you have a repo with an applicable example: GitHub Repo

Resume

Add the react-helmet dependency.
Write the dynamic component for the title.
Add the dynamic component to your router or your pages.

Add the `react-helmet` dependency.

If you're using yarn

$ yarn add react-helmet

If you're using npm

$ npm i react-helmet

Write the dynamic component for the title.

You can write an independent component for this example, like this:

// TitleComponent.jsx

import React from 'react';
import Helmet from 'react-helmet';

const TitleComponent = ({ title }) => {
    var defaultTitle = '⚛️ app';
    return (
        <Helmet>
            <title>{title ? title : defaultTitle}</title>
        </Helmet>
    );
};

export { TitleComponent };

In this example, we just wrote an independent component that could receive a title and, if you don't send a prop as title, the title will be the default title.

Add the dynamic component to your routes.

We have multiple approaches to add this component to your app, it depends mostly on your decisions on routing (if you're using Gatsby or Next.js you can ovoid configure a router, but if you're using create-react-app or a react boiler template you can add this to your router.

Adding this component to your routes (Using router):


// routes.js

import React from 'react';
import { Route } from 'react-router';
import { TitleComponent } from './TitleComponent.jsx';

// withTitle function
const withTitle = ({ component: Component, title }) => {
    return class Title extends Component {
        render() {
            return (
                <React.Fragment>
                    <TitleComponent title={title} />
                    <Component {...this.props} />
                </React.Fragment>
            );
        }
    };
};

// Example pages 
const Index = () => <h1>This is the IndexComponent!</h1>;
const Persons = () => <h1>This is the PersonsComponent!</h1>;
const Dogs = () => <h1>This is the DogsComponent!</h1>;
const Food = () => <h1>This is the FoodComponent!</h1>;

// Adding title
const IndexComponent = withTitle({ component: Index, title: 'Index' });
const PersonsComponent = withTitle({ component: Persons, title: '🧠 Persons' });
const DogsComponent = withTitle({ component: Dogs, title: '🐶 Dogs' });
const FoodComponent = withTitle({ component: Food, title: '🌮 Food' });

// Your router
export default (
    <Route>
        <Route path="/" component={IndexComponent} />
        <Route path="/persons" component={PersonsComponent} />
        <Route path="/dogs" component={DogsComponent} />
        <Route path="/food" component={FoodComponent} />
    </Route>
);

Adding this component to your pages (Using Next.js, Gatsby, After.js):

Using withTitle function:

// pages/pageOne.jsx

import React from 'react';
import { TitleComponent } from './TitleComponent.jsx';

// withTitle function
const withTitle = ({ component: Component, title }) => {
    return class Title extends Component {
        render() {
            return (
                <React.Fragment>
                    <TitleComponent title={title} />
                    <Component {...this.props} />
                </React.Fragment>
            );
        }
    };
};

const PageOne = () => (
    <React.Fragment>
        <h1> Page 1 </h1>
        // Some content...
    </React.Fragment>
);

export default withTitle({ component: PageOne, title: 'Page One!' });

Adding directly the <TitleComponent /> to your page:

// pages/pageOne.jsx

import React from 'react';
import { TitleComponent } from './TitleComponent.jsx';

const PageOne = () => (
    <React.Fragment>
        <TitleComponent title="Page One!" />
        <h1> Page 1 </h1>
        // Some content...
    </React.Fragment>
);

export default PageOne;