In certain situations, you want to skip the first render of the useEffect hook. Currently, we don’t have any mechanism built or hook defined by React Team which does the job for us.

How do we use useEffect?

Actually, In React, the useEffect hook runs after every render cycle of the component.

Not aware of that?? So here’s the catch. For example.

useEffect(() => {
  if(searchText) getSearchTextData(searchText)
}, [searchText])

Here, I added the useEffect block and searchText in the dependency array. Ideally, when searchText will change, the useEffect hook should be triggered.

You are right. It will trigger when searchText will be changed. But It also gets triggered when you render the component for the first time.

This means the useEffect block gets called on every render cycle of any component.

However, there may be cases where you want to skip the first useEffect call and only execute it on subsequent updates. That means controlling when the useEffect Hook runs.

In this guide, I will share a custom hook that skips useEffect from running on the first render but allows code execution on subsequent renders.

Using useRef to skip the initial useEffect run

One way to achieve this is by using a ref to keep track of whether the component is mounting or not.

You can set the initial value of the ref to true, and then set it to false after the first useEffect call.

For example:

import { useEffect, useRef } from 'react';

const exampleComponent = () => {
  const checkFirstRender = useRef(true);

  useEffect(() => {
    if (checkFirstRender.current) {
      checkFirstRender.current = false;
      return;
    }
    // Rest useEffect code here for subsequent updates
  });

  // Rest component code here
}

In this example, the checkFirstRender ref is initialized to true. In the useEffect callback, if checkFirstRender.current is true, we skip the rest of the function and set the checkFirstRender.current to false. On subsequent updates, the rest of the useEffect code will execute as It should.

By using this approach, you can effectively skip the first useEffect call in React. Now, let me show you how to define it as a custom hook.

A custom hook – useSkipFirstRender

import {useEffect, useRef} from 'react';

function useSkipFirstRender(callback, dependencies) {
  const firstRenderRef = useRef(true);

  useEffect(() => {
    if (firstRenderRef.current) {
      firstRenderRef.current = false;
      return;
    }
    callback();
  }, dependencies);
}

export default useSkipFirstRender;

Here, I have defined one function useSkipFirstRender with two params callback and dependencies. As I showed you previously, I have used the useRef hook to manage the value of the first render.

The callback function will be the rest of the code inside the useEffect hook. While dependencies will be an array of values on which useEffect should be called.

Now, our main example can be rewritten in this way.

useSkipFirstRender(() => {
    getSearchTextData(searchText);
  }, [searchText]);

I hope you liked this article. If you know any other way to skip the first render of useEffect then do let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading!