Update: The component router has finally been officially deprecated and discontinued. You should not be using it. This post is here for posterity’s sake, but it goes to show how flakey our industry can really be.

A new router for Angular 1.x was announced over a year ago. That router is usually called the Component Router, but you may have seen the name “new router” (or ngNewRouter) thrown around.

Its release keeps getting delayed. Documentation is scarce. The GitHub repo is abandoned.

I keep seeing people wondering whether they should be using it and how. Let’s try and answer those concerns.

What is different about it?

The component router is aimed to make routing easier in a world of components, like the awesome ones we got in 1.5.

It has some similarities to the Angular 2 router.

The component router also incorporates some features that have long been considered a standard in ui-router, such as nested routes.

The gist is that you define a root component – that’s the component that starts all your app’s rendering.

In it you render sub-routes using an outlet (<ng-outlet></ng-outlet>), much like the old ng-view or ui-router’s ui-view.

But, you can keep on nesting these outlets, which isn’t possible with ng-view.

You can read more in the design doc.

Can you start using it?

Well, it hasn’t been released yet, but according to the Angular weekly meeting notes it should be out very soon.

I wouldn’t start writing code in it just yet, but you should definitely spend a few minutes reading the code of this demo by one of the Angular core maintainers.

And if you really want to play with it, that demo is a good starting point.

Once it’ll be out officially (hopefully in a couple of weeks) check this space for more information on using it and migrating your existing apps to it.