react.dev/warnings/refs-must-have-owner.md

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Refs Must Have Owner Warning	single	warnings/refs-must-have-owner.html

You are probably here because you got the following error messages:

Warning:

addComponentAsRefTo(...): Only a ReactOwner can have refs. You might be adding a ref to a component that was not created inside a component's render method, or you have multiple copies of React loaded.

This usually means one of two things:

• You are trying to add a ref to an element that is being created outside of a component's render() function.
• You have multiple (conflicting) copies of React loaded (eg. due to a miss-configured NPM dependency)

Invalid Refs

Only a ReactOwner can have refs. This usually means that you're trying to add a ref to a component that doesn't have an owner (that is, was not created inside of another component's render method). Try rendering this component inside of a new top-level component which will hold the ref.

Multiple copies of React

Bower does a good job of deduplicating dependencies, but NPM does not. If you aren't doing anything (fancy) with refs, there is a good chance that the problem is not with your refs, but rather an issue with having multiple copies of React loaded into your project. Sometimes, when you pull in a third-party module via npm, you will get a duplicate copy of the dependency library, and this can create problems.

If you are using npm... npm ls or npm ls react might help illuminate.