Programmatically navigate in your SvelteKit app with goto

After using SvelteKit for a while, you've probably came across a situation where you need to navigate to another page of your app (e.g. after a successful login).

Since SvelteKit is mostly plain JavaScript, you can still use native web APIs like  window.location window.location  to navigate .

However, this might not be what you're looking for, since this will trigger a full page reload, breaking the SPA experience you get with SvelteKit.

Enter the  goto  function

SvelteKit provides a  goto  function that you can use to navigate programmatically in your app.

This function is part of the  $app/navigation  module, that provides other helpful functions like  afterNavigate ,  invalidateAll  and more.

Let's see the  goto  function in action:

This snippet will navigate to the  /dashboard  page after the  login  function is called.

Advanced usage

The  goto  function accepts an optional second argument, that can be used to pass additional options to the navigation.

Here is the full function definition for  goto , per SvelteKit documentation:

The option you will probably use the most is  invalidateAll , which will rerun all  load  functions of the page you're navigating to.

Another one that you might find useful is  replaceState , which will replace the current  history  entry rather than creating a new one with  pushState . This is useful when you want to navigate to a page, but don't want the user to be able to go back to the previous page.

Gotcha:  goto  can only be called on the client

If you find yourself doing something like:

you'll probably get an error that reads like this:

This is because `goto` can only be called on the client , since it uses some native browser APIs that are not available on the server .

In case you're not sure if you're on the client or the server, you can wrap your `goto` call in a `onMount() ` lifecycle function, which will only run on the client when the component is mounted: