React Leaflet: Opening Popups Programmatically

Leaflet is great for web applications that need to show information on maps. And if you're using React, you're probably using the useful React Leaflet package.

When working with Leaflet through React, you'll need to get used to using a few of the APIs in a more imperative, non-Reacty way.

In this post, I'll show you how to reveal a marker with its popup on a Map rendered by React Leaflet.

Starting Point: A Map that Renders a Marker with a Popup

Let's say you have the following map which shows a single marker:

import { MapContainer, TileLayer, Marker, Popup } from 'react-leaflet'
const MAP_CENTER = [52.52, 13.405]
const MARKER_POSITION = [52.49913882549316, 13.418318969833383]
function App() {
    return (
        <div className="App">
            <MapContainer
                style={{ width: 500, height: 500 }}
                center={MAP_CENTER}
                zoom={13}
            >
                <TileLayer
                    attribution='&copy; <a href="http://osm.org/copyright">OpenStreetMap</a> contributors'
                    url="https://{s}.tile.openstreetmap.org/{z}/{x}/{y}.png"
                />
                <Marker position={MARKER_POSITION}>
                    <Popup>Hello I'm a popup!</Popup>
                </Marker>
            </MapContainer>
        </div>
    )
}

Showing the Marker and Popup Programmatically with React Leaflet

Now let's add a button we can click to show the marker and popover.

For this we'll need references to the map itself as well as the marker created by Leaflet.

import { MapContainer, TileLayer, Marker, Popup } from 'react-leaflet'
import { useRef } from 'react'
const MAP_CENTER = [52.52, 13.405]
const MARKER_POSITION = [52.49913882549316, 13.418318969833383]
function App() {
    const mapRef = useRef(null)
    const markerRef = useRef(null)
    const onClickShowMarker = () => {
        const map = mapRef.current
        if (!map) {
            return
        }
        map.flyTo(MARKER_POSITION, 13)
        const marker = markerRef.current
        if (marker) {
            marker.openPopup()
        }
    }
    return (
        <div className="App">
            <MapContainer
                whenCreated={(map) => {
                    mapRef.current = map
                }}
                style={{ width: 500, height: 500 }}
                center={MAP_CENTER}
                zoom={13}
            >
                <TileLayer
                    attribution='&copy; <a href="http://osm.org/copyright">OpenStreetMap</a> contributors'
                    url="https://{s}.tile.openstreetmap.org/{z}/{x}/{y}.png"
                />
                <Marker ref={markerRef} position={MARKER_POSITION}>
                    <Popup>Hello I'm a popup!</Popup>
                </Marker>
            </MapContainer>
            <button onClick={onClickShowMarker}>Show marker</button>
        </div>
    )
}

This is the result:

You can view the full code on CodeSandbox.