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React useRef By Example: What It Is, Why We Need It

There are two use cases of useRef:

  • Directly access DOM nodes to perform DOM operations imperatively
  • Persist a value across rerenders, throughout the full lifetime of a component instance

The second use is particularly powerful when combined with useEffect, useState and useCallback. In this post, we used it in two real-world scenarios:

  • Preserve previous state
  • Preserve the reference of a timeout or interval so that we can clear them at a later time (in another render round)