Vanilla client

The magic of tRPC is making strongly typed API calls without relying on code generation. With full-stack TypeScript projects, you can directly import types from the server into the client! This is a vital part of how tRPC works.

Import the AppRouter type into your client from the file your root tRPC router is defined. This single type represents the type signature of your entire API.

client.ts
ts
import type { AppRouter } from '../path/to/server/trpc';

client.ts
ts
import type { AppRouter } from '../path/to/server/trpc';

The import type keywords let you import from any TypeScript file on your filesystem. Plus import type can only import types, NOT code. So there's no danger of accidentally importing server-side code into your client. All calls to import type are always fully erased from your compiled JavaScript bundle (source).

Initialize a tRPC client

Create a typesafe client with the createTRPCProxyClient method from @trpc/client, and add a links array with a terminating link. If you want to learn more about tRPC links, check out the docs here:

client.ts
ts
// pages/index.tsx
import { createTRPCProxyClient, httpBatchLink } from '@trpc/client';
import type { AppRouter } from '../path/to/server/trpc';
const client = createTRPCProxyClient<AppRouter>({
  links: [
    httpBatchLink({
      url: 'http://localhost:3000/trpc',
    }),
  ],
});

client.ts
ts
// pages/index.tsx
import { createTRPCProxyClient, httpBatchLink } from '@trpc/client';
import type { AppRouter } from '../path/to/server/trpc';
const client = createTRPCProxyClient<AppRouter>({
  links: [
    httpBatchLink({
      url: 'http://localhost:3000/trpc',
    }),
  ],
});

As you can see, we passed AppRouter as a type argument of createTRPCProxyClient. This returns a strongly typed client instance, a proxy that mirrors the structure of your AppRouter on the client:

client.ts
ts
const bilbo = await client.getUser.query('id_bilbo');
// => { id: 'id_bilbo', name: 'Bilbo' };
const frodo = await client.createUser.mutate({ name: 'Frodo' });
// => { id: 'id_frodo', name: 'Frodo' };

client.ts
ts
const bilbo = await client.getUser.query('id_bilbo');
// => { id: 'id_bilbo', name: 'Bilbo' };
const frodo = await client.createUser.mutate({ name: 'Frodo' });
// => { id: 'id_frodo', name: 'Frodo' };