What is the best way to manage a user’s session in React?

I would avoid using component state since this could be difficult to manage and prone to issues that can be difficult to troubleshoot.

You should use either cookies or localStorage for persisting a user’s session data. You can also use a closure as a wrapper around your cookie or localStorage data.

Here is a simple example of a UserProfile closure that will hold the user’s name.

var UserProfile = (function() {
  var full_name = "";

  var getName = function() {
    return full_name;    // Or pull this from cookie/localStorage
  };

  var setName = function(name) {
    full_name = name;     
    // Also set this in cookie/localStorage
  };

  return {
    getName: getName,
    setName: setName
  }

})();

export default UserProfile;

When a user logs in, you can populate this object with user name, email address etc.

import UserProfile from './UserProfile';

UserProfile.setName("Some Guy");

Then you can get this data from any component in your app when needed.

import UserProfile from './UserProfile';

UserProfile.getName();

Using a closure will keep data outside of the global namespace, and make it is easily accessible from anywhere in your app.