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React Redux TypeScript Quick Start

What You'll Learn
  • How to set up and use Redux Toolkit and React Redux with TypeScript
Prerequisites

Introduction

Welcome to the React Redux TypeScript Quick Start tutorial! This tutorial will briefly show how to use TypeScript with Redux Toolkit.

This page focuses on just how to set up the TypeScript aspects . For explanations of what Redux is, how it works, and full examples of how to use Redux, see the Redux core docs tutorials.

Both React-Redux and Redux Toolkit are already written in TypeScript, so their TS type definitions are built in.

React Redux has its type definitions in a separate @types/react-redux typedefs package on NPM. In addition to typing the library functions, the types also export some helpers to make it easier to write typesafe interfaces between your Redux store and your React components.

The Redux+TS template for Create-React-App comes with a working example of these patterns already configured.

info

The recently updated @types/react@18 major version has changed component definitions to remove having children as a prop by default. This causes errors if you have multiple copies of @types/react in your project. To fix this, tell your package manager to resolve @types/react to a single version. Details:

https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/24304#issuecomment-1094565891

Project Setup

Define Root State and Dispatch Types

Redux Toolkit's configureStore API should not need any additional typings. You will, however, want to extract the RootState type and the Dispatch type so that they can be referenced as needed. Inferring these types from the store itself means that they correctly update as you add more state slices or modify middleware settings.

Since those are types, it's safe to export them directly from your store setup file such as app/store.ts and import them directly into other files.

app/store.ts
import { configureStore } from '@reduxjs/toolkit'
// ...

const store = configureStore({
  reducer: {
    posts: postsReducer,
    comments: commentsReducer,
    users: usersReducer,
  },
})

// Infer the `RootState` and `AppDispatch` types from the store itself
export type RootState = ReturnType<typeof store.getState>
// Inferred type: {posts: PostsState, comments: CommentsState, users: UsersState}
export type AppDispatch = typeof store.dispatch

Define Typed Hooks

While it's possible to import the RootState and AppDispatch types into each component, it's better to create typed versions of the useDispatch and useSelector hooks for usage in your application. This is important for a couple reasons:

  • For useSelector, it saves you the need to type (state: RootState) every time
  • For useDispatch, the default Dispatch type does not know about thunks. In order to correctly dispatch thunks, you need to use the specific customized AppDispatch type from the store that includes the thunk middleware types, and use that with useDispatch. Adding a pre-typed useDispatch hook keeps you from forgetting to import AppDispatch where it's needed.

Since these are actual variables, not types, it's important to define them in a separate file such as app/hooks.ts, not the store setup file. This allows you to import them into any component file that needs to use the hooks, and avoids potential circular import dependency issues.

app/hooks.ts
import { TypedUseSelectorHook, useDispatch, useSelector } from 'react-redux'
import type { RootState, AppDispatch } from './store'

// Use throughout your app instead of plain `useDispatch` and `useSelector`
export const useAppDispatch: () => AppDispatch = useDispatch
export const useAppSelector: TypedUseSelectorHook<RootState> = useSelector

Application Usage

Define Slice State and Action Types

Each slice file should define a type for its initial state value, so that createSlice can correctly infer the type of state in each case reducer.

All generated actions should be defined using the PayloadAction<T> type from Redux Toolkit, which takes the type of the action.payload field as its generic argument.

You can safely import the RootState type from the store file here. It's a circular import, but the TypeScript compiler can correctly handle that for types. This may be needed for use cases like writing selector functions.

features/counter/counterSlice.ts
import { createSlice, PayloadAction } from '@reduxjs/toolkit'
import type { RootState } from '../../app/store'

// Define a type for the slice state
interface CounterState {
  value: number
}

// Define the initial state using that type
const initialState: CounterState = {
  value: 0,
}

export const counterSlice = createSlice({
  name: 'counter',
  // `createSlice` will infer the state type from the `initialState` argument
  initialState,
  reducers: {
    increment: (state) => {
      state.value += 1
    },
    decrement: (state) => {
      state.value -= 1
    },
    // Use the PayloadAction type to declare the contents of `action.payload`
    incrementByAmount: (state, action: PayloadAction<number>) => {
      state.value += action.payload
    },
  },
})

export const { increment, decrement, incrementByAmount } = counterSlice.actions

// Other code such as selectors can use the imported `RootState` type
export const selectCount = (state: RootState) => state.counter.value

export default counterSlice.reducer

The generated action creators will be correctly typed to accept a payload argument based on the PayloadAction<T> type you provided for the reducer. For example, incrementByAmount requires a number as its argument.

In some cases, TypeScript may unnecessarily tighten the type of the initial state. If that happens, you can work around it by casting the initial state using as, instead of declaring the type of the variable:

// Workaround: cast state instead of declaring variable type
const initialState = {
  value: 0,
} as CounterState

Use Typed Hooks in Components

In component files, import the pre-typed hooks instead of the standard hooks from React-Redux.

features/counter/Counter.tsx
import React, { useState } from 'react'

import { useAppSelector, useAppDispatch } from 'app/hooks'

import { decrement, increment } from './counterSlice'

export function Counter() {
  // The `state` arg is correctly typed as `RootState` already
  const count = useAppSelector((state) => state.counter.value)
  const dispatch = useAppDispatch()

  // omit rendering logic
}

What's Next?

See the "Usage with TypeScript" page for extended details on how to use Redux Toolkit's APIs with TypeScript.