react router v6 navigate outside of components

Well, it turns out you can duplicate the behavior if you implement a custom router that instantiates the history state in the same manner as RRDv6 routers.

Examine the BrowserRouter implementation for example:

export function BrowserRouter({
  basename,
  children,
  window
}: BrowserRouterProps) {
  let historyRef = React.useRef<BrowserHistory>();
  if (historyRef.current == null) {
    historyRef.current = createBrowserHistory({ window });
  }

  let history = historyRef.current;
  let [state, setState] = React.useState({
    action: history.action,
    location: history.location
  });

  React.useLayoutEffect(() => history.listen(setState), [history]);

  return (
    <Router
      basename={basename}
      children={children}
      location={state.location}
      navigationType={state.action}
      navigator={history}
    />
  );
}

Create a CustomRouter that consumes a custom history object and manages the state:

const CustomRouter = ({ history, ...props }) => {
  const [state, setState] = useState({
    action: history.action,
    location: history.location
  });

  useLayoutEffect(() => history.listen(setState), [history]);

  return (
    <Router
      {...props}
      location={state.location}
      navigationType={state.action}
      navigator={history}
    />
  );
};

This effectively proxies the custom history object into the Router and manages the navigation state.

From here you swap in the CustomRouter with custom history object for the existing Router imported from react-router-dom.

export default function App() {
  return (
    <CustomRouter history={history}>
      <div className="App">
        <Routes>
          <Route path="/" element={<Home />} />
          <Route path="/profile" element={<Profile />} />
        </Routes>
      </div>
    </CustomRouter>
  );
}

Fork of your codesandbox:

Update

react-router-dom@6 now also surfaces a history router.

HistoryRouter

<unstable_HistoryRouter> takes an instance of the history library as
prop. This allows you to use that instance in non-React contexts or as
a global variable.

import { unstable_HistoryRouter as HistoryRouter } from "react-router-dom";
import { createBrowserHistory } from "history";

const history = createBrowserHistory({ window });

ReactDOM.render(
  <HistoryRouter history={history}>
    {/* The rest of your app goes here */}
  </HistoryRouter>,
  root
);

There is this note:

This API is currently prefixed as unstable_ because you may
unintentionally add two versions of the history library to your app,
the one you have added to your package.json and whatever version React
Router uses internally. If it is allowed by your tooling, it’s
recommended to not add history as a direct dependency and instead
rely on the nested dependency from the react-router package. Once we
have a mechanism to detect mis-matched versions, this API will remove
its unstable_ prefix.