Web Development

Announcing React Hydration Overlay - Easily Squash Hydration Errors

December 13, 2023

Written By Sami Jaber

TL;DR: go to https://github.com/BuilderIO/hydration-overlay to install the overlay and debug your hydration mismatch.

Last week, I spent hours debugging a tricky hydration mismatch. I had to:

copy the HTML sent over the wire,
console.log the HTML generated on the client and copy it,
paste both of them into an online diff checker tool.

I got tired of doing this, so I automated it. Hence @builder.io/react-hydration-overlay!

How does it work?

The solution I landed on is fairly rudimentary (like all the best solutions!). The package works in 2 parts:

First, you use a plugin to inject hydration-overlay-initializer.js into your app's entry point. This script reads the HTML from the server and stores it, and then listens for hydration errors and stores the page's HTML that exists then.
Second, you wrap your app's root in HydrationOverlay, a component that will read the data from the previous step and display it in an overlay.

What frameworks does it support?

Currently, only Next.js via a Webpack Plugin. But PRs are more than welcome: what you need is to inject a script into the bundle's entry point, which is fairly straightforward task.

How to get started

Install the dependnecy with npm (or pnpm, yarn, etc):

Add the overlay component to the root of your app:

Add the plugin to your next.config.js

And that's all. Read more in the project readme

Why?

As anyone who's had a React hydration mismatch knows, the errors are rather cryptic. In a large page, it becomes extremely difficult to find the mismatched element. While this tool isn't perfect, it automates away a cumbersome manual process that many currently resort to to pin down the exact mismatch.

NOTE: There is a WIP PR to fix this in React, so hopefully there will be a native solution to this problem soon. This plugin will remian handy for all older React versions.

Caveats

When hydration fails, React will re-render your app on the client-side. It turns out that React renders things slightly differently in SSR VS CSR. The most visible one I've seen is style HTML attributes: whitespace and semi-colons are added in the CSR, and in some cases, the attributes are re-ordered and shorthand attributes are expanded (the most extreme case is all: unset which can seemingly turn into hundreds of properties!). So keep in mind that there will be some false positives when using this plugin. I still firmly believe that it is a net positive to have this tool in your arsenal when debugging hairy issues!