How to use a Pinia store within a navigation guard

If you are building a medium-sized application, you will end up using navigation guards to browse the different pages of your application.

The basic use case is when you want to check an element exists before loading its details (for example on beforeEnter).

Now, if you are building the application with Vue 3 and Pinia, you will do this by querying a store.

However, the application doesn’t load Pinia until the mount call and you load the router before that…

Therefore, Pinia will throw an error “getActivePinia()” was called but there was no active Pinia. Are you trying to use a store before calling “app.use(pinia)”? See https://pinia.vuejs.org/core-concepts/outside-component-usage.html for help. This will fail in production.

What is the solution? I followed the steps of this Stackoverflow answer.

1. Create a pinia.ts file to create the Pinia instance. Place it in the same location that you put your stores.
2. Import it and call use on the application instance in main.ts
3. Import it in src/router/index.ts and provide it to your store instance: const store = useStore( pinia )

The signature of the store useStory doesn’t need to change. Providing the pinia instance to the useStore() is sufficient to make it work.

If you want to learn Pinia, VueSchool.io has a great course on the subject! I recommend it.

Credit: image from VueSchool’s course on Pinia.