One Router to Rule Them All: Full-Stack Type Safety with TanStack Router

If you've ever built a full-stack TypeScript application, you know the feeling. You get beautiful, end-to-end type safety for your data layer with tools like tRPC, but your routing layer often feels like a separate, loosely-coupled part of the puzzle. You define routes on the server, then manually mirror them on the client, hoping your links and navigations don't break with a typo. What if your router could bridge that gap?

TanStack Router is a new type-safe router for React that aims to do exactly that. It's not just about managing client-side state; it's designed to be the single source of truth for routing across your entire application stack, from the frontend all the way to your backend server.

What It Does

TanStack Router is a framework-agnostic routing library (with first-class React support) built with a relentless focus on type safety and developer experience. At its core, it uses your route definitions—configured as a plain object or via a file-based system—to generate a fully-typed router.

The magic happens when you use these types. Every Link, useNavigate call, or parameter access is strictly validated against your defined routes. This means you catch broken links at compile time, not in production. But it goes further: by structuring your router to be shared between client and server, you can ensure your backend route handlers and your frontend route consumers are always in sync.

Why It's Cool

The type safety is the headline feature, but the implementation is what makes it stand out. It uses TypeScript's type system incredibly aggressively to infer everything it can from your route configuration. You define a route with a parameter like user/:userId, and instantly, useParams() knows it returns an object with a userId string. No manual type definitions needed.

Beyond the types, it packs features modern apps expect:

• Built-in Loaders: Fetch data for a route before it renders, with built-in caching and invalidation via TanStack Query integration.
• File-Based Routing: Optional filesystem-based configuration that feels intuitive and keeps your code organized.
• Search Param Management: Full type safety for URL search parameters, treating them as first-class state.
• Relative Navigation: Navigate to sibling or child routes without hardcoding full paths.

The vision is to use this single, type-safe router configuration to generate not just your client-side routes, but also the routing logic for your backend framework (like Express, Fastify, or your Next.js API routes). This eliminates the duplication and drift that inevitably happens when routes are defined in two places.

How to Try It

Getting started is straightforward, especially if you're using Vite.

# Create a new Vite + React + TypeScript project
npm create vite@latest my-app -- --template react-ts
cd my-app

# Install TanStack Router and its CLI
npm install @tanstack/react-router
npm install -D @tanstack/router-cli

Next, you'll set up your route tree. You can define it in a single file or use the file-based routing convention by creating a src/routes directory. The project's GitHub repository has excellent, detailed examples for both approaches.

The key step is running the router's CLI to generate the type-safe router from your configuration. You'd add this to your package.json scripts:

"scripts": {
  "build:routes": "tanstack-router build"
}

From there, you can wrap your app with the generated router provider and start building with links and hooks that your IDE will autocomplete and validate.

Final Thoughts

TanStack Router feels like a logical next step in the evolution of type-safe full-stack development. If you're already sold on the benefits of type safety for your API layer, extending that confidence to your routing is a huge win. It does introduce a new abstraction and a build step, so it might be overkill for a tiny project. But for any substantial application where maintenance and refactoring are concerns, the ability to rename a route parameter and have TypeScript guide you through every required change is a powerful form of productivity.

It's a tool built for developers who are tired of "stringly-typed" URLs and want their router to be a first-class, type-checked part of their architecture. Give the docs a read and see if it clicks with how you want to build apps.

@githubprojects