useShare - your friendly web share API hook!

Trigger the Web Share API, and fall back to copying the value to clipboard.

Usage

This is how you use the useShare hook.

import React from 'react';
import useShare from 'use-share';

const ShareButton = () => {
  const { share, hasShared } = useShare({
    title: 'Check out use-share',
    text: 'use-share is a really cool library, you should check it out!',
    url: 'https://github.com/selbekk/use-share',
  });
  return (
    <button onClick={share} disabled={hasShared}>
      {hasShared ? 'Shared!' : 'Share'}
    </button>
  );
};

You call the hook with an object describing what you want to share - a title, a text and the URL to the content you want to share. You don't have to specify all three - but since you don't know how the user will want to share your content, you probably should. If the user chooses the e-mail app on their phone, for instance, they'll get the title as the subject, the text as the body, and a link to the URL at the bottom.

You can read more about the Web Share API at web.dev.

The hook returns an object with two properties - share and hasShared. When you call share, you share the content. hasShared is a boolean that is true for 1.5 seconds after you shared (so you can tell your user real quick).

Fallback

If the user's device doesn't support the Web Share API, it will copy the URL parameter to the clipboard. If you didn't specify a url parameter, it will copy the text, and if that isn't specified, it will copy the title. If you didn't specify any of the three, you should talk to somebody about your life choices.

No files?

The Web Share API supports sharing files too, but this hook doesn't. 🤷‍♂️ If you need support for this, use the Web Share API directly instead.

Questions?

Feel free to create an issue if you got questions, or reach out to me on Twitter. I ❤️ pull requests too, so if you find a bug, please let me know.