Route Module Type Safety

React Router generates route-specific types to power type inference for URL params, loader data, and more. This guide will help you set it up if you didn't start with a template.

To learn more about how type safety works in React Router, check out Type Safety Explanation.

1. Add .react-router/ to .gitignore

React Router generates types into a .react-router/ directory at the root of your app. This directory is fully managed by React Router and should be gitignore'd.

.react-router/

2. Include the generated types in tsconfig

Edit your tsconfig to get TypeScript to use the generated types. Additionally, rootDirs needs to be configured so the types can be imported as relative siblings to route modules.

{
  "include": [".react-router/types/**/*"],
  "compilerOptions": {
    "rootDirs": [".", "./.react-router/types"]
  }
}

If you are using multiple tsconfig files for your app, you'll need to make these changes in whichever one includes your app directory. For example, the node-custom-server template contains tsconfig.json, tsconfig.node.json, and tsconfig.vite.json. Since tsconfig.vite.json is the one that includes the app directory, that's the one that sets up .react-router/types for route module type safety.

3. Generate types before type checking

If you want to run type checking as its own command — for example, as part of your Continuous Integration pipeline — you'll need to make sure to generate types before running typechecking:

{
  "scripts": {
    "typecheck": "react-router typegen && tsc"
  }
}

4. Type-only auto-imports (optional)

When auto-importing the Route type helper, TypeScript will generate:

import { Route } from "./+types/my-route";

But if you enable verbatimModuleSyntax:

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "verbatimModuleSyntax": true
  }
}

Then, you will get the type modifier for the import automatically as well:

import type { Route } from "./+types/my-route";
//     ^^^^

This helps tools like bundlers to detect type-only module that can be safely excluded from the bundle.

Conclusion

React Router's Vite plugin should be automatically generating types into .react-router/types/ anytime you edit your route config (routes.ts). That means all you need to do is run react-router dev (or your custom dev server) to get to up-to-date types in your routes.

Check out our Type Safety Explanation for an example of how to pull in those types into your routes.