ReactJS Bootstrap Navbar and Routing not working together

For those who have a problem with styling Link component from react-router-dom in react-bootstrap navbar, simply add className="nav-link", like this:

<Link to="/" className="nav-link">Home</Link>

instead of

<Nav.Link href="/">Home</Nav.Link>


First of all, in your snippets it doesn't seem like you're wrapping your code in a Router, so you should make sure that you're doing that inside App or in ReactDOM.render:

import { BrowserRouter } from 'react-router-dom';

ReactDOM.render(
  <BrowserRouter>
    <App />
  </BrowserRouter>, 
  rootElement
  );

Next, your specific problem is that you're rendering react-bootstrap's Nav.Link instead of react-router's Link component, so the router is not picking up your route changes. Fortunately, react-bootstrap provides a render prop in most of its components to specify which component or element you want to render if you don't want the default. Switch to something like this:

import { Switch, Route, Link } from 'react-router-dom';

class Navigation extends Component {
  render() {
    return (
      <div>
        <div>
          <Navbar>
            <Navbar.Brand as={Link} to="/" >React-Bootstrap</Navbar.Brand>
            <Navbar.Collapse>
              <Nav className="mr-auto">
                <NavItem eventkey={1} href="/">
                  <Nav.Link as={Link} to="/" >Home</Nav.Link>
                </NavItem>
              </Nav>
              <Form inline>
                <FormControl type="text" placeholder="Search" className="mr-sm-2" />
                <Button variant="outline-success">Search</Button>
              </Form>
            </Navbar.Collapse>
          </Navbar>
        </div>
        <div>
          <Switch>
            <Route exact path='/' component={Home} />
            <Route render={function () {
              return <p>Not found</p>
            }} />
          </Switch>
        </div>
      </div>
    );
  }
}

I hope I'm no late to help some other people trying to solve this.

You can use the NavLink, instead of as={Link}. It will render with the same behavior of Link, but will "watch" the router URL to define which link is indeed active:

<Nav defaultActiveKey="/bills" as="ul">
      <Nav.Item as="li">
        <Nav.Link as={NavLink} to="/bills">Dividas</Nav.Link>
      </Nav.Item>
      <Nav.Item as="li">
        <Nav.Link as={NavLink} to="/other">Em construção</Nav.Link>
      </Nav.Item>
    </Nav>

import ReactDOM from 'react-dom';
import { BrowserRouter } from 'react-router-dom';

ReactDOM.render(
<BrowserRouter>
<App />
</BrowserRouter>,
document.getElementById('root')
);

and Navbar.js:

import React from 'react';
import {Container,Navbar,Nav,NavItem } from 'react-bootstrap';
import {Link} from 'react-router-dom';

<Nav className="ml-auto">
<NavItem>   <Link className="nav-link"   to="/">Home</Link> </NavItem> 
<NavItem>   <Link  className="nav-link" to="/about">About</Link> </NavItem> 
<NavItem>    <Link className="nav-link"   to="/contact">Contact</Link> </NavItem> 
</Nav>

This resolved the: <Link> outside a <Router> error for me.