Trigger Effect Only When The Component Mounts

With useEffect, you generally want to values used in the function to also be included in the dependency list. This ensures the effect is triggered whenever any of those values change.

But what if you only want the effect to be triggered when the component first mounts?

This can be done by including an empty dependency list.

import React, { useState, useEffect } from "react";

function App() {
  const [count, setCount] = useState(0);
  const incrementCount = () => {
    setCount(prevCount => prevCount + 1);
  };

  useEffect(() => {
    console.log("The count is:", count);
  }, []);

  return (
    <div>
      <button onClick={incrementCount}>+</button>
      <p>Count: {count}</p>
    </div>
  );
}

In this example, we will see The count is: 0 get logged when the component first mounts. As we hit the button to increment the count, nothing else will be logged.

See the live example.