Get Started Using React and Drupal Together

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Get Started Using React and Drupal Together

Combining React and Drupal allows developers to build modern, interactive front-end experiences while leveraging Drupal’s powerful content management capabilities on the back end. This hybrid approach is increasingly popular for projects that require both dynamic interfaces and robust content workflows.

Why Use React with Drupal?
Drupal is a mature CMS known for its structured data handling, user management, and editorial tools. React, on the other hand, excels at creating fast, component-based, interactive user interfaces. Using them together gives you the best of both worlds—Drupal manages the content, while React handles the presentation.

This architecture is often called "headless" or decoupled Drupal", where Drupal acts purely as a content API, and React consumes that API to render the UI.

Setting Up the Environment
To start using React with Drupal, you'll need:

Drupal (9 or 10): Installed and configured with the JSON:API module (built-in from Drupal 8.7 onwards).

React App: Created using a tool like create-react-app or any framework of your choice.

Install and enable the JSON:API module in Drupal:

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drush en jsonapi
This exposes all your content types and fields via a RESTful API endpoint (e.g., /jsonapi/node/article).

Fetching Data in React
Once your API is ready, you can fetch data in your React components using fetch, axios, or a data fetching library like SWR or React Query. Here's a basic example using fetch:

javascript
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useEffect(() => {
fetch('http://your-drupal-site.com/jsonapi/node/article')
.then(response => response.json())
.then(data => setArticles(data.data));
}, []);
CORS and Authentication
Make sure your Drupal site allows cross-origin requests from your React app’s domain. You may need to configure CORS settings in your services.yml file.

For authenticated routes, you can use cookie-based sessions or OAuth depending on your app’s needs.

Final Thoughts
Using React with Drupal is a powerful combination that provides performance, flexibility, and editorial ease. You can progressively decouple specific parts of your site or go fully headless depending on your requirements. As the ecosystem around decoupled Drupal grows, it’s becoming easier to build rich digital experiences that scale.

Posted on 12 Aug 2025