Swiper React | How to create custom navigation/pagination components using React refs?

While Pierrat’s answer did initially solve it for me, I was encountering a bug where the navigation buttons wouldn’t do anything until after I’d paused and restarted the Swiper.

To fix, I created my own functions for handling the updates and used those instead.

const MyComponent = () => {
  const sliderRef = useRef(null);

  const handlePrev = useCallback(() => {
    if (!sliderRef.current) return;
    sliderRef.current.swiper.slidePrev();
  }, []);

  const handleNext = useCallback(() => {
    if (!sliderRef.current) return;
    sliderRef.current.swiper.slideNext();
  }, []);

  return (
    <div>
      <Swiper ref={sliderRef}>
        <SwiperSlide />
        ...slides
        <SwiperSlide />
      </Swiper>
      <div className="prev-arrow" onClick={handlePrev} />
      <div className="next-arrow" onClick={handleNext} />
    </div>
  )
}