We're going to be short on words and quick on code in this quickstart. If you're looking to see what Remix is all about in 15 minutes, this is it.
This uses TypeScript, but we always pepper the types on after we write the code. This isn't our normal workflow, but some of you aren't using TypeScript so we didn't want to clutter up the code for you. Normally we create the type as we write the code so that we get it right the first time (measure twice, cut once!).
💿 Initialize a new Remix project
npx create-remix@latest
# choose Remix App Server
cd [whatever you named the project]
npm run dev
We're going to be doing some work with the file system and not all setups are compatible with the code in this tutorial.
Open up http://localhost:3000, the app should be running. If you want, take a minute and poke around the starter template, there's a lot of information in there.
If your application is not running properly at http://localhost:3000 refer to the README.md in the generated project files to see if additional set up is required for your deployment target.
This might happen if you've added ignore-scripts = true to your npm configuration or you're using pnpm or other package manager that does not automatically run postinstall scripts, which Remix relies on.
We're going to make a new route to render at the "/posts" URL. Before we do that, let's link to it.
💿 Add a link to posts in app/root.tsx
<Link to="/posts">Posts</Link>
You can put it anywhere you like, you might want to just delete everything that's there.
Back in the browser go ahead and click the link. You should see a 404 page since we've not created this route yet. Let's create the route now:
💿 Create a new file in app/routes/posts/index.tsx
mkdir app/routes/posts
touch app/routes/posts/index.tsx
mkdir and touch is just a way for us to make it clear which files you should be creating.
We could have named it just posts.tsx but we'll have another route soon and it'll be nice to put them by each other. An index route will render at the folder's path (just like index.html on a web server).
You'll probably see the screen just go blank with null. You've got a route but there's nothing there yet. Let's add a component and export it as the default:
💿 Make the posts component
export default function Posts() {
return (
<div>
<h1>Posts</h1>
</div>
);
}
You might need to refresh the browser to see our new, bare-bones posts route.
Data loading is built in to Remix.
If your web dev background is primarily in the last few years, you're probably used to creating two things here: an API route to provide data and a frontend component that consumes it. In Remix your frontend component is also its own API route and it already knows how to talk to itself on the server from the browser. That is, you don't have to fetch it.
If your background is a bit farther back than that with MVC web frameworks like Rails, then you can think of your Remix routes as backend views using React for templating, but then they know how to seamlessly hydrate in the browser to add some flair instead of writing detached jQuery code to dress up the user interactions. It's progressive enhancement realized in its fullest. Additionally, your routes are their own controller.
So let's get to it and provide some data to our component.
💿 Make the posts route "loader"
import { useLoaderData } from "remix";
export const loader = () => {
return [
{
slug: "my-first-post",
title: "My First Post"
},
{
slug: "90s-mixtape",
title: "A Mixtape I Made Just For You"
}
];
};
export default function Posts() {
const posts = useLoaderData();
console.log(posts);
return (
<div>
<h1>Posts</h1>
</div>
);
}
Loaders are the backend "API" for their component and it's already wired up for you through useLoaderData. It's a little wild how blurry the line is between the client and the server in a Remix route. If you have your server and browser consoles both open, you'll note that they both logged our post data. That's because Remix rendered on the server to send a full HTML document like a traditional web framework, but it also hydrated in the client and logged there too.
💿 Render links to our posts
import { Link, useLoaderData } from "remix";
// ...
export default function Posts() {
const posts = useLoaderData();
return (
<div>
<h1>Posts</h1>
<ul>
{posts.map(post => (
<li key={post.slug}>
<Link to={post.slug}>{post.title}</Link>
</li>
))}
</ul>
</div>
);
}
TypeScript is mad, so let's help it out:
💿 Add the Post type and generic for useLoaderData
import { Link, useLoaderData } from "remix";
type Post = {
slug: string;
title: string;
};
export const loader = () => {
const posts: Post[] = [
{
slug: "my-first-post",
title: "My First Post"
},
{
slug: "90s-mixtape",
title: "A Mixtape I Made Just For You"
}
];
return posts;
};
export default function Posts() {
const posts = useLoaderData<Post[]>();
return (
<div>
<h1>Posts</h1>
<ul>
{posts.map(post => (
<li key={post.slug}>
<Link to={post.slug}>{post.title}</Link>
</li>
))}
</ul>
</div>
);
}
Hey, that's pretty cool. We get a pretty solid degree of type safety even over a network request because it's all defined in the same file. Unless the network blows up while Remix fetches the data, you've got type safety in this component and its API (remember, the component is already its own API route).
A solid practice is to create a module that deals with a particular concern. In our case it's going to be reading and writing posts. Let's set that up now and add a getPosts export to our module.
💿 Create app/post.ts
touch app/post.ts
We're mostly gonna copy/paste it from our route:
export type Post = {
slug: string;
title: string;
};
export function getPosts() {
const posts: Post[] = [
{
slug: "my-first-post",
title: "My First Post"
},
{
slug: "90s-mixtape",
title: "A Mixtape I Made Just For You"
}
];
return posts;
}
💿 Update the posts route to use our new posts module
import { Link, useLoaderData } from "remix";
import { getPosts } from "~/post";
import type { Post } from "~/post";
export const loader = () => {
return getPosts();
};
// ...
If we were building this for real, we'd want to store our posts in a database somewhere like Postgres, FaunaDB, Supabase, etc. This is a quickstart, so we're just going to use the file system.
Instead of hard-coding our links, we'll read them from the file system.
💿 Create a "posts/" folder in the root of the project, not in the app directory, but next to it.
mkdir posts
Now add some posts:
touch posts/my-first-post.md
touch posts/90s-mixtape.md
Put whatever you want in them, but make sure they've got some "front matter" attributes in them with a title
---
title: My First Post
---
# This is my first post
Isn't it great?
---
title: 90s Mixtape
---
# 90s Mixtape
- I wish (Skee-Lo)
- This Is How We Do It (Montell Jordan)
- Everlong (Foo Fighters)
- Ms. Jackson (Outkast)
- Interstate Love Song (Stone Temple Pilots)
- Killing Me Softly With His Song (Fugees, Ms. Lauryn Hill)
- Just a Friend (Biz Markie)
- The Man Who Sold The World (Nirvana)
- Semi-Charmed Life (Third Eye Blind)
- ...Baby One More Time (Britney Spears)
- Better Man (Pearl Jam)
- It's All Coming Back to Me Now (Céline Dion)
- This Kiss (Faith Hill)
- Fly Away (Lenny Kravits)
- Scar Tissue (Red Hot Chili Peppers)
- Santa Monica (Everclear)
- C'mon N' Ride it (Quad City DJ's)
💿 Update getPosts to read from the file system
We'll need a node module for this:
npm add front-matter
import path from "path";
import fs from "fs/promises";
import parseFrontMatter from "front-matter";
export type Post = {
slug: string;
title: string;
};
// relative to the server output not the source!
const postsPath = path.join(__dirname, "..", "posts");
export async function getPosts() {
const dir = await fs.readdir(postsPath);
return Promise.all(
dir.map(async filename => {
const file = await fs.readFile(
path.join(postsPath, filename)
);
const { attributes } = parseFrontMatter(
file.toString()
);
return {
slug: filename.replace(/\.md$/, ""),
title: attributes.title
};
})
);
}
This isn't a Node file system tutorial, so you'll just have to trust us on that code. As mentioned before, you could pull this markdown from a database somewhere (which we will show you in a later tutorial).
TypeScript is gonna be mad at that code, let's make it happy.
Since we're reading in a file, the type system has no idea what's in there, so we need a runtime check, for that we'll want an invariant method to make runtime checks like this easy.
💿 Ensure our posts have the proper meta data and get type safety
npm add tiny-invariant
import path from "path";
import fs from "fs/promises";
import parseFrontMatter from "front-matter";
import invariant from "tiny-invariant";
export type Post = {
slug: string;
title: string;
};
export type PostMarkdownAttributes = {
title: string;
};
const postsPath = path.join(__dirname, "..", "posts");
function isValidPostAttributes(
attributes: any
): attributes is PostMarkdownAttributes {
return attributes?.title;
}
export async function getPosts() {
const dir = await fs.readdir(postsPath);
return Promise.all(
dir.map(async filename => {
const file = await fs.readFile(
path.join(postsPath, filename)
);
const { attributes } = parseFrontMatter(
file.toString()
);
invariant(
isValidPostAttributes(attributes),
`${filename} has bad meta data!`
);
return {
slug: filename.replace(/\.md$/, ""),
title: attributes.title
};
})
);
}
Even if you aren't using TypeScript you're going to want that invariant check so you know what's wrong, too.
Okay! Back in the UI we should see our list of posts. Feel free to add some more posts, refresh, and watch the list grow.
Now let's make a route to actually view the post. We want these URLs to work:
/posts/my-first-post
/posts/90s-mix-cdr
Instead of creating a route for every single one of our posts, we can use a "dynamic segment" in the url. Remix will parse and pass to us so we can look up the post dynamically.
💿 Create a dynamic route at "app/routes/posts/$slug.tsx"
touch app/routes/posts/\$slug.tsx
export default function PostSlug() {
return (
<div>
<h1>Some Post</h1>
</div>
);
}
You can click one of your posts and should see the new page.
💿 Add a loader to access the params
import { useLoaderData } from "remix";
export const loader = async ({ params }) => {
return params.slug;
};
export default function PostSlug() {
const slug = useLoaderData();
return (
<div>
<h1>Some Post: {slug}</h1>
</div>
);
}
The part of the filename attached to the $ becomes a named key on the params object that comes into your loader. This is how we'll look up our blog post.
💿 Let's get some help from TypeScript for the loader function signature.
import { useLoaderData } from "remix";
import type { LoaderFunction } from "remix";
export const loader: LoaderFunction = async ({
params
}) => {
return params.slug;
};
Now let's actually read the post from the file system.
💿 Add a getPost function to our post module
Put this function anywhere in the app/post.ts module:
// ...
export async function getPost(slug: string) {
const filepath = path.join(postsPath, slug + ".md");
const file = await fs.readFile(filepath);
const { attributes } = parseFrontMatter(file.toString());
invariant(
isValidPostAttributes(attributes),
`Post ${filepath} is missing attributes`
);
return { slug, title: attributes.title };
}
💿 Use the new getPost function in the route
import { useLoaderData } from "remix";
import type { LoaderFunction } from "remix";
import { getPost } from "~/post";
import invariant from "tiny-invariant";
export const loader: LoaderFunction = async ({
params
}) => {
invariant(params.slug, "expected params.slug");
return getPost(params.slug);
};
export default function PostSlug() {
const post = useLoaderData();
return (
<div>
<h1>{post.title}</h1>
</div>
);
}
Check that out! We're now pulling our posts from a data source instead of including it all in the browser as JavaScript.
Quick note on that invariant. Because params comes from the URL, we can't be totally sure that params.slug will be defined--maybe you change the name of the file to $postId.ts! It's good practice to validate that stuff with invariant, and it makes TypeScript happy too.
There are a lot of markdown parsers, we'll use "marked" for this tutorial because it's really easy to get working.
💿 Parse the markdown into HTML
npm add marked
# if using typescript
npm add @types/marked
import path from "path";
import fs from "fs/promises";
import parseFrontMatter from "front-matter";
import invariant from "tiny-invariant";
import { marked } from "marked";
//...
export async function getPost(slug: string) {
const filepath = path.join(postsPath, slug + ".md");
const file = await fs.readFile(filepath);
const { attributes, body } = parseFrontMatter(
file.toString()
);
invariant(
isValidPostAttributes(attributes),
`Post ${filepath} is missing attributes`
);
const html = marked(body);
return { slug, html, title: attributes.title };
}
💿 Render the HTML in the route
// ...
export default function PostSlug() {
const post = useLoaderData();
return (
<div dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: post.html }} />
);
}
Holy smokes, you did it. You have a blog.
Right now our blog posts (and typo fixes) are tied to deploys. While that works and is a simple way to get started, ultimately it's much better to not have to redeploy the whole app for a simple typo change. The idea here is that your posts would be backed by a database, so we need a way to create a new blog post. We're going to be using actions for that.
Let's make a new "admin" section of the app.
💿 Create an admin route
touch app/routes/admin.tsx
import { Link, useLoaderData } from "remix";
import { getPosts } from "~/post";
import type { Post } from "~/post";
export const loader = () => {
return getPosts();
};
export default function Admin() {
const posts = useLoaderData<Post[]>();
return (
<div className="admin">
<nav>
<h1>Admin</h1>
<ul>
{posts.map(post => (
<li key={post.slug}>
<Link to={`/posts/${post.slug}`}>
{post.title}
</Link>
</li>
))}
</ul>
</nav>
<main>...</main>
</div>
);
}
You should recognize a lot of that code from the posts route. We set up some extra HTML structure cause we're going to style this real quick.
💿 Create an admin stylesheet
touch app/styles/admin.css
.admin {
display: flex;
}
.admin > nav {
padding-right: 2rem;
}
.admin > main {
flex: 1;
border-left: solid 1px #ccc;
padding-left: 2rem;
}
em {
color: red;
}
💿 Link to the stylesheet in the admin route
import { Link, useLoaderData } from "remix";
import { getPosts } from "~/post";
import type { Post } from "~/post";
import adminStyles from "~/styles/admin.css";
export const links = () => {
return [{ rel: "stylesheet", href: adminStyles }];
};
// ...
Each route can export a links function that returns array of <link> tags, except in object form instead of HTML. So we use { rel: "stylesheet", href: adminStyles} instead of <link rel="stylesheet" href="..." />. This allows Remix to merge all of your rendered routes links together and render them in the <Links/> element at the top of your document. You can see another example of this in root.tsx if you're curious.
Alright, you should have a decent looking page with the posts on the left and a placeholder on the right. For now, you need to navigate to http://localhost:3000/admin manually as we haven't set up any navigational links yet.
Let's fill in that placeholder with an index route for admin. Hang with us, we're introducing "nested routes" here where your route file nesting becomes UI component nesting.
💿 Create a folder for admin.tsx's child routes, with an index inside
mkdir app/routes/admin
touch app/routes/admin/index.tsx
import { Link } from "remix";
export default function AdminIndex() {
return (
<p>
<Link to="new">Create a New Post</Link>
</p>
);
}
If you refresh you're not going to see it yet. Every route inside of app/routes/admin/ can now render inside of app/routes/admin.tsx when their URL matches. You get to control which part of the admin.tsx layout the child routes render.
💿 Add an outlet to the admin page
import { Outlet, Link, useLoaderData } from "remix";
//...
export default function Admin() {
const posts = useLoaderData<Post[]>();
return (
<div className="admin">
<nav>
<h1>Admin</h1>
<ul>
{posts.map(post => (
<li key={post.slug}>
<Link to={`/posts/${post.slug}`}>
{post.title}
</Link>
</li>
))}
</ul>
</nav>
<main>
<Outlet />
</main>
</div>
);
}
Hang with us for a minute, index routes can be confusing at first. Just know that when the URL matches the parent route's path, the index will render inside the outlet.
Maybe this will help, let's add the "/admin/new" route and see what happens when we click the link.
💿 Create the app/routes/admin/new.tsx route
touch app/routes/admin/new.tsx
export default function NewPost() {
return <h2>New Post</h2>;
}
Now click the link from the index route and watch the <Outlet/> automatically swap out the index route for the "new" route!
We're gonna get serious now. Let's build a form to create a new post in the our new "new" route.
💿 Add a form to the new route
import { Form } from "remix";
export default function NewPost() {
return (
<Form method="post">
<p>
<label>
Post Title: <input type="text" name="title" />
</label>
</p>
<p>
<label>
Post Slug: <input type="text" name="slug" />
</label>
</p>
<p>
<label htmlFor="markdown">Markdown:</label>
<br />
<textarea id="markdown" rows={20} name="markdown" />
</p>
<p>
<button type="submit">Create Post</button>
</p>
</Form>
);
}
If you love HTML like us, you should be getting pretty excited. If you've been doing a lot of <form onSubmit> and <button onClick> you're about to have your mind blown by HTML.
All you really need for a feature like this is a form to get data from the user and a backend action to handle it. And in Remix, that's all you have to do, too.
Let's create the essential code that knows how to save a post first in our post.ts module.
💿 Add createPost anywhere inside of app/post.ts
// ...
export async function createPost(post) {
const md = `---\ntitle: ${post.title}\n---\n\n${post.markdown}`;
await fs.writeFile(
path.join(postsPath, post.slug + ".md"),
md
);
return getPost(post.slug);
}
💿 Call createPost from the new post route's action
import { redirect, Form } from "remix";
import { createPost } from "~/post";
export const action = async ({ request }) => {
const formData = await request.formData();
const title = formData.get("title");
const slug = formData.get("slug");
const markdown = formData.get("markdown");
await createPost({ title, slug, markdown });
return redirect("/admin");
};
export default function NewPost() {
// ...
}
That's it. Remix (and the browser) will take of the rest. Click the submit button and watch the sidebar that lists our posts update automatically.
In HTML an input's name attribute is sent over the network and available by the same name on the request's formData.
TypeScript is mad again, let's add some types.
💿 Add the types to both files we changed
// ...
type NewPost = {
title: string;
slug: string;
markdown: string;
};
export async function createPost(post: NewPost) {
const md = `---\ntitle: ${post.title}\n---\n\n${post.markdown}`;
await fs.writeFile(
path.join(postsPath, post.slug + ".md"),
md
);
return getPost(post.slug);
}
//...
import { Form, redirect } from "remix";
import type { ActionFunction } from "remix";
import { createPost } from "~/post";
export const action: ActionFunction = async ({
request
}) => {
const formData = await request.formData();
const title = formData.get("title");
const slug = formData.get("slug");
const markdown = formData.get("markdown");
await createPost({ title, slug, markdown });
return redirect("/admin");
};
Whether you're using TypeScript or not, we've got a problem when the user doesn't provide values on some of these fields (and TS is still mad about that call to createPost).
Let's add some validation before we create the post.
💿 Validate if the form data contains what we need, and return the errors if not
//...
export const action: ActionFunction = async ({
request
}) => {
const formData = await request.formData();
const title = formData.get("title");
const slug = formData.get("slug");
const markdown = formData.get("markdown");
const errors = {};
if (!title) errors.title = true;
if (!slug) errors.slug = true;
if (!markdown) errors.markdown = true;
if (Object.keys(errors).length) {
return errors;
}
await createPost({ title, slug, markdown });
return redirect("/admin");
};
Notice we don't return a redirect this time, we actually return the errors. These errors are available to the component via useActionData. It's just like useLoaderData but the data comes from the action after a form POST.
💿 Add validation messages to the UI
import {
useActionData,
Form,
redirect,
ActionFunction
} from "remix";
// ...
export default function NewPost() {
const errors = useActionData();
return (
<Form method="post">
<p>
<label>
Post Title:{" "}
{errors?.title ? (
<em>Title is required</em>
) : null}
<input type="text" name="title" />
</label>
</p>
<p>
<label>
Post Slug:{" "}
{errors?.slug ? <em>Slug is required</em> : null}
<input type="text" name="slug" />
</label>
</p>
<p>
<label htmlFor="markdown">Markdown:</label>{" "}
{errors?.markdown ? (
<em>Markdown is required</em>
) : null}
<br />
<textarea rows={20} name="markdown" />
</p>
<p>
<button type="submit">Create Post</button>
</p>
</Form>
);
}
TypeScript is still mad, so let's add some invariants and a new type for the error object to make it happy.
//...
import invariant from "tiny-invariant";
type PostError = {
title?: boolean;
slug?: boolean;
markdown?: boolean;
};
export const action: ActionFunction = async ({
request
}) => {
// ...
const errors: PostError = {};
if (!title) errors.title = true;
if (!slug) errors.slug = true;
if (!markdown) errors.markdown = true;
if (Object.keys(errors).length) {
return errors;
}
invariant(typeof title === "string");
invariant(typeof slug === "string");
invariant(typeof markdown === "string");
await createPost({ title, slug, markdown });
return redirect("/admin");
};
For some real fun, disable JavaScript in your dev tools and try it out. Because Remix is built on the fundamentals of HTTP and HTML, this whole thing works without JavaScript in the browser. But that's not the point. Let's slow this down and add some "pending UI" to our form.
💿 Slow down our action with a fake delay
// ...
export const action: ActionFunction = async ({
request
}) => {
await new Promise(res => setTimeout(res, 1000));
const formData = await request.formData();
const title = formData.get("title");
const slug = formData.get("slug");
const markdown = formData.get("markdown");
// ...
};
//...
💿 Add some pending UI with useTransition
import {
useTransition,
useActionData,
Form,
redirect
} from "remix";
// ...
export default function NewPost() {
const errors = useActionData();
const transition = useTransition();
return (
<Form method="post">
{/* ... */}
<p>
<button type="submit">
{transition.submission
? "Creating..."
: "Create Post"}
</button>
</p>
</Form>
);
}
Now the user gets an enhanced experience than if we had just done this without JavaScript in the browser at all. Some other things that you could do to make it better is automatically slugify the title into the slug field or let the user override it (maybe we'll add that later).
That's it for today! Your homework is to make an /admin/edit page for your posts. The links are already there in the sidebar but they return 404! Create a new route that reads the posts, and puts them into the fields. All the code you need is already in app/routes/posts/$slug.ts and app/routes/posts/new.ts. You just gotta put it together.
We hope you love Remix!
