reactjs - Nested Routes not rendering with React Router v4

Question

I am trying to group some of my routes together with React Router v4 to clean up some of my components. For now I just want to have my non logged in routes group together and my admin routes grouped together but the following doens't work.

main.js

const Main = () => {
  return (
    <main>
      <Switch>
        <Route exact path='/' component={Public} />
        <Route path='/admin' component={Admin} />
      </Switch>
    </main>
  );
};

export default Main;

public.js

const Public = () => {
  return (
    <Switch>
      <Route exact path='/' component={Greeting} />
      <Route path='/signup' component={SignupPage} />
      <Route path='/login' component={LoginPage} />
    </Switch>
  );
};

export default Public;

The Greeting component shows at "localhost:3000/", but the SignupPage component does not show at "localhost:3000/signup" and the Login component doesn't show at "localhost:3000/signup". Looking at the React Dev Tools these two routes return Null.

Answer 1

The reason is very obvious. for your route in main.js, you have specified the Route path of Public component with exact exact path='/' and then in the Public component you are matching for the other Routes. So if the route path is /signup, at first the path is not exact so Public component is not rendered and hence no subRoutes will.

Change your route configuration to the following

main.js

const Main = () => {
  return (
    <main>
      <Switch>
        <Route path='/' component={Public} />
        <Route path='/admin' component={Admin} />
      </Switch>
    </main>
  );
};

export default Main

public.js

const Public = () => {
  return (
    <Switch>
      <Route exact path='/' component={Greeting} />
      <Route path='/signup' component={SignupPage} />
      <Route path='/login' component={LoginPage} />
    </Switch>
  );
};

Also when you are specifying the nested routes these should be relative to the parent Route, for instance if the parent route is /home and then in the child Route you wish to write /dashboard . It should be written like

<Route path="/home/dashboard" component={Dashboard}

or even better

<Route path={`${this.props.match.path}/dashboard`} component={Dashboard}