To set up a basic form using React Hook Form, begin by importing the useForm hook from the react-hook-form package. This hook provides all the essential methods you need to create and manage your form. Start by initializing the hook inside your component:

import { useForm } from "react-hook-form";

Call useForm() at the top of your component. This returns several useful properties, but for a simple form, you mainly need register and handleSubmit. The register function connects your input fields to the form state, while handleSubmit helps manage form submission.

const { register, handleSubmit } = useForm();

Create a form element and use the handleSubmit method to wrap your submit handler function. This ensures the form data is processed correctly by React Hook Form:

<form onSubmit={handleSubmit(onSubmit)}>
  <input {...register("firstName")} />
  <input type="submit" />
</form>

In this example, the register function is spread into the input's props, linking the input with the form state under the name "firstName". When the form is submitted, the onSubmit function receives the collected data as its argument.

React Hook Form manages form state internally, which means you do not need to set up local state for each input. When you use the register function on an input, React Hook Form tracks its value and validation status automatically. Each input field registered with register is included in the form's data object, which is passed to your submit handler when the form is submitted.

This approach reduces boilerplate code and improves performance by minimizing unnecessary re-renders. You can access the current values of all registered inputs through the data object provided to your submit function. This makes it easy to capture and use user input without manually managing state for each field.