Creating a custom useScrollPosition hook for tracking scroll position

11 Oct 2023

In this tutorial, we will learn how to create a custom useScrollPosition hook in React for tracking the scroll position of a webpage. This will allow us to implement various scroll-related effects and functionalities in our web applications.

Introduction
Prerequisites
Implementation
Summary

Introduction

Tracking the scroll position of a webpage is a common requirement in web development. With the help of the useScrollPosition hook, we can easily obtain the current scroll position of the page and use it to trigger various animations, lazy loading, parallax effects, or any other functionality that relies on scroll position.

Prerequisites

To follow along with this tutorial, you should have a basic understanding of React Hooks and JavaScript.

Implementation

Setting up the Project

Before we begin, make sure you have a React project set up. You can create one using create-react-app or any other method of your choice.

Creating the Hook

Let’s start by creating a new file called useScrollPosition.js and define our useScrollPosition hook:

import { useEffect, useState } from 'react';

const useScrollPosition = () => {
  const [scrollPosition, setScrollPosition] = useState(0);

  useEffect(() => {
    const handleScroll = () => {
      const position = window.scrollY;
      setScrollPosition(position);
    };

    document.addEventListener('scroll', handleScroll);

    // Cleanup the event listener on unmount
    return () => {
      document.removeEventListener('scroll', handleScroll);
    };
  }, []);

  return scrollPosition;
};

export default useScrollPosition;

In the above code, we define a custom hook called useScrollPosition that uses the useEffect and useState hooks. It adds a scroll event listener to the document and updates the scrollPosition state whenever the user scrolls the page. We also clean up the event listener when the component unmounts.

Using the Hook

Now, let’s see an example of how we can use the useScrollPosition hook in our components. Assuming we have a component called ScrollComponent, here’s how we can implement it:

import React from 'react';
import useScrollPosition from './useScrollPosition';

const ScrollComponent = () => {
  const scrollPosition = useScrollPosition();

  return (
    <div>
      <h1>Scroll Component</h1>
      <p>Scroll position: {scrollPosition}px</p>
    </div>
  );
};

export default ScrollComponent;

In the above code, we import the useScrollPosition hook and use it in our ScrollComponent. We then render the current scroll position on the screen.

Summary

In this tutorial, we learned how to create a custom useScrollPosition hook in React for tracking the scroll position of a webpage. We can now use this hook to implement various scroll-related effects and functionalities in our web applications. The useScrollPosition hook provides a simple and reusable way to track scroll position and build engaging user interfaces.

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