Components and Hooks must be pure

Pure functions only perform a calculation and nothing more. It makes your code easier to understand, debug, and allows React to automatically optimize your components and Hooks correctly.

Note

This reference page covers advanced topics and requires familiarity with the concepts covered in the Keeping Components Pure page.

Why does purity matter?
Components and Hooks must be idempotent
Side effects must run outside of render
- When is it okay to have mutation?
Props and state are immutable
- Don’t mutate Props
- Don’t mutate State
Return values and arguments to Hooks are immutable
Values are immutable after being passed to JSX

Why does purity matter?

One of the key concepts that makes React, React is purity. A pure component or hook is one that is:

Idempotent – You always get the same result everytime you run it with the same inputs – props, state, context for component inputs; and arguments for hook inputs.
Has no side effects in render – Code with side effects should run separately from rendering. For example as an event handler – where the user interacts with the UI and causes it to update; or as an Effect – which runs after render.
Does not mutate non-local values: Components and Hooks should never modify values that aren’t created locally in render.

When render is kept pure, React can understand how to prioritize which updates are most important for the user to see first. This is made possible because of render purity: since components don’t have side effects in render, React can pause rendering components that aren’t as important to update, and only come back to them later when it’s needed.

Concretely, this means that rendering logic can be run multiple times in a way that allows React to give your user a pleasant user experience. However, if your component has an untracked side effect – like modifying the value of a global variable during render – when React runs your rendering code again, your side effects will be triggered in a way that won’t match what you want. This often leads to unexpected bugs that can degrade how your users experience your app. You can see an example of this in the Keeping Components Pure page.

How does React run your code?

React is declarative: you tell React what to render, and React will figure out how best to display it to your user. To do this, React has a few phases where it runs your code. You don’t need to know about all of these phases to use React well. But at a high level, you should know about what code runs in render, and what runs outside of it.

Rendering refers to calculating what the next version of your UI should look like. After rendering, Effects are flushed (meaning they are run until there are no more left) and may update the calculation if the Effects have impacts on layout. React takes this new calculation and compares it to the calulation used to create the previous version of your UI, then commits just the minimum changes needed to the DOM (what your user actually sees) to catch it up to the latest version.

Deep Dive

How to tell if code runs in render

One quick heuristic to tell if code runs during render is to examine where it is: if it’s written at the top level like in the example below, there’s a good chance it runs during render.

function Dropdown() {
  const selectedItems = new Set(); // created during render
  // ...
}

Event handlers and Effects don’t run in render:

function Dropdown() {
  const selectedItems = new Set();
  const onSelect = (item) => {
    // this code is in an event handler, so it's only run when the user triggers this
    selectedItems.add(item);
  }
}

function Dropdown() {
  const selectedItems = new Set();
  useEffect(() => {
    // this code is inside of an Effect, so it only runs after rendering
    logForAnalytics(selectedItems);
  }, [selectedItems]);
}

Components and Hooks must be idempotent

Components must always return the same output with respect to their inputs – props, state, and context. This is known as idempotency. Idempotency is a term popularized in functional programming. It refers to the idea that you always get the same result everytime you run that piece of code with the same inputs.

This means that all code that runs during render must also be idempotent in order for this rule to hold. For example, this line of code is not idempotent (and therefore, neither is the component):

function Clock() {
  const time = new Date(); // 🔴 Bad: always returns a different result!
  return <span>{time.toLocaleString()}</span>
}

new Date() is not idempotent as it always returns the current date and changes its result every time it’s called. When you render the above component, the time displayed on the screen will stay stuck on the time that the component was rendered. Similarly, functions like Math.random() also aren’t idempotent, because they return different results every time they’re called, even when the inputs are the same.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use non-idempotent functions like new Date() at all – you should just avoid using them during render. In this case, we can synchronize the latest date to this component using an Effect:

Fork

import { useState, useEffect } from 'react';

function useTime() {
  // 1. Keep track of the current date's state. `useState` receives an initializer function as its
  //    initial state. It only runs once when the hook is called, so only the current date at the
  //    time the hook is called is set first.
  const [time, setTime] = useState(() => new Date());

  useEffect(() => {
    // 2. Update the current date every second using `setInterval`.
    const id = setInterval(() => {
      setTime(new Date()); // ✅ Good: non-idempotent code no longer runs in render
    }, 1000);
    // 3. Return a cleanup function so we don't leak the `setInterval` timer.
    return () => clearInterval(id);
  }, []);

  return time;
}

export default function Clock() {
  const time = useTime();
  return <span>{time.toLocaleString()}</span>;
}

By wrapping the non-idempotent new Date() call in an Effect, it moves that calculation outside of rendering.

If you don’t need to synchronize some external state with React, you can also consider using an event handler if it only needs to be updated in response to a user interaction.

Side effects must run outside of render

Side effects should not run in render, as React can render components multiple times to create the best possible user experience.

Note

Side effects are a broader term than Effects. Effects specifically refer to code that’s wrapped in useEffect, while a side effect is a general term for code that has any observable effect other than its primary result of returning a value to the caller.

Side effects are typically written inside of event handlers or Effects. But never during render.

While render must be kept pure, side effects are necessary at some point in order for your app to do anything interesting, like showing something on the screen! The key point of this rule is that side effects should not run in render, as React can render components multiple times. In most cases, you’ll use event handlers to handle side effects. Using an event handler explicitly tells React that this code doesn’t need to run during render, keeping render pure. If you’ve exhausted all options – and only as a last resort – you can also handle side effects using useEffect.

When is it okay to have mutation?

Local mutation

One common example of a side effect is mutation, which in JavaScript refers to changing the value of a non-primitive value. In general, while mutation is not idiomatic in React, local mutation is absolutely fine:

function FriendList({ friends }) {
  const items = []; // ✅ Good: locally created
  for (let i = 0; i < friends.length; i++) {
    const friend = friends[i];
    items.push(
      <Friend key={friend.id} friend={friend} />
    ); // ✅ Good: local mutation is okay
  }
  return <section>{items}</section>;
}

There is no need to contort your code to avoid local mutation. Array.map could also be used here for brevity, but there is nothing wrong with creating a local array and then pushing items into it during render.

Even though it looks like we are mutating items, the key point to note is that this code only does so locally – the mutation isn’t “remembered” when the component is rendered again. In other words, items only stays around as long as the component does. Because items is always recreated every time <FriendList /> is rendered, the component will always return the same result.

On the other hand, if items was created outside of the component, it holds on to its previous values and remembers changes:

const items = []; // 🔴 Bad: created outside of the component
function FriendList({ friends }) {
  for (let i = 0; i < friends.length; i++) {
    const friend = friends[i];
    items.push(
      <Friend key={friend.id} friend={friend} />
    ); // 🔴 Bad: mutates a value created outside of render
  }
  return <section>{items}</section>;
}

When <FriendList /> runs again, we will continue appending friends to items every time that component is run, leading to multiple duplicated results. This version of <FriendList /> has observable side effects during render and breaks the rule.

Lazy initialization

Lazy initialization is also fine despite not being fully “pure”:

function ExpenseForm() {
  SuperCalculator.initializeIfNotReady(); // ✅ Good: if it doesn't affect other components
  // Continue rendering...
}

Changing the DOM

Side effects that are directly visible to the user are not allowed in the render logic of React components. In other words, merely calling a component function shouldn’t by itself produce a change on the screen.

function ProductDetailPage({ product }) {
  document.window.title = product.title; // 🔴 Bad: Changes the DOM
}

One way to achieve the desired result of updating window.title outside of render is to synchronize the component with window.

As long as calling a component multiple times is safe and doesn’t affect the rendering of other components, React doesn’t care if it’s 100% pure in the strict functional programming sense of the word. It is more important that components must be idempotent.

Props and state are immutable

A component’s props and state are immutable snapshots. Never mutate them directly. Instead, pass new props down, and use the setter function from useState.

You can think of the props and state values as snapshots that are updated after rendering. For this reason, you don’t modify the props or state variables directly: instead you pass new props, or use the setter function provided to you to tell React that state needs to update the next time the component is rendered.

Don’t mutate Props

Props are immutable because if you mutate them, the application will produce inconsistent output, which can be hard to debug since it may or may not work depending on the circumstance.

function Post({ item }) {
  item.url = new Url(item.url, base); // 🔴 Bad: never mutate props directly
  return <Link url={item.url}>{item.title}</Link>;
}

function Post({ item }) {
  const url = new Url(item.url, base); // ✅ Good: make a copy instead
  return <Link url={url}>{item.title}</Link>;
}

Don’t mutate State

useState returns the state variable and a setter to update that state.

const [stateVariable, setter] = useState(0);

Rather than updating the state variable in-place, we need to update it using the setter function that is returned by useState. Changing values on the state variable doesn’t cause the component to update, leaving your users with an outdated UI. Using the setter function informs React that the state has changed, and that we need to queue a re-render to update the UI.

function Counter() {
  const [count, setCount] = useState(0);

  function handleClick() {
    count = count + 1; // 🔴 Bad: never mutate state directly
  }

  return (
    <button onClick={handleClick}>
      You pressed me {count} times
    </button>
  );
}

function Counter() {
  const [count, setCount] = useState(0);

  function handleClick() {
    setCount(count + 1); // ✅ Good: use the setter function returned by useState
  }

  return (
    <button onClick={handleClick}>
      You pressed me {count} times
    </button>
  );
}

Return values and arguments to Hooks are immutable

Once values are passed to a hook, you should not modify them. Like props in JSX, values become immutable when passed to a hook.

function useIconStyle(icon) {
  const theme = useContext(ThemeContext);
  if (icon.enabled) {
    icon.className = computeStyle(icon, theme); // 🔴 Bad: never mutate hook arguments directly
  }
  return icon;
}

function useIconStyle(icon) {
  const theme = useContext(ThemeContext);
  const newIcon = { ...icon }; // ✅ Good: make a copy instead
  if (icon.enabled) {
    newIcon.className = computeStyle(icon, theme);
  }
  return newIcon;
}

One important principle in React is local reasoning: the ability to understand what a component or hook does by looking at its code in isolation. Hooks should be treated like “black boxes” when they are called. For example, a custom hook might have used its arguments as dependencies to memoize values inside it:

function useIconStyle(icon) {
  const theme = useContext(ThemeContext);

  return useMemo(() => {
    const newIcon = { ...icon };
    if (icon.enabled) {
      newIcon.className = computeStyle(icon, theme);
    }
    return newIcon;
  }, [icon, theme]);
}

If you were to mutate the Hooks arguments, the custom hook’s memoization will become incorrect, so it’s important to avoid doing that.

style = useIconStyle(icon);         // `style` is memoized based on `icon`
icon.enabled = false;               // Bad: 🔴 never mutate hook arguments directly
style = useIconStyle(icon);         // previously memoized result is returned

style = useIconStyle(icon);         // `style` is memoized based on `icon`
icon = { ...icon, enabled: false }; // Good: ✅ make a copy instead
style = useIconStyle(icon);         // new value of `style` is calculated

Similarly, it’s important to not modify the return values of Hooks, as they may have been memoized.

Values are immutable after being passed to JSX

Don’t mutate values after they’ve been used in JSX. Move the mutation before the JSX is created.

When you use JSX in an expression, React may eagerly evaluate the JSX before the component finishes rendering. This means that mutating values after they’ve been passed to JSX can lead to outdated UIs, as React won’t know to update the component’s output.

function Page({ colour }) {
  const styles = { colour, size: "large" };
  const header = <Header styles={styles} />;
  styles.size = "small"; // 🔴 Bad: styles was already used in the JSX above
  const footer = <Footer styles={styles} />;
  return (
    <>
      {header}
      <Content />
      {footer}
    </>
  );
}

function Page({ colour }) {
  const headerStyles = { colour, size: "large" };
  const header = <Header styles={headerStyles} />;
  const footerStyles = { colour, size: "small" }; // ✅ Good: we created a new value
  const footer = <Footer styles={footerStyles} />;
  return (
    <>
      {header}
      <Content />
      {footer}
    </>
  );
}

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