Angular 2 How to detect back button press using router and location.go()?

Another alternative for this issue would be to subscribe to the events emitted by the Angular Router service. Since we are dealing with routing, it seems to me that using Router events makes more sense.

constructor(router: Router) {
    router.events
      .subscribe((event: NavigationStart) => {
        if (event.navigationTrigger === 'popstate') {
          // Perform actions
        }
      });
}

I would like to note that popstate happens when pressing back and forward on the browser. So in order to do this efficiently, you would have to find a way to determine which one is occurring. For me, that was just using the event object of type NavigationStart which gives information about where the user is coming from and where they are going to.

I don't know if the other answers are dated, but neither of them worked well for me in Angular 7. What I did was add an Angular event listener by importing it into my component:

import { HostListener } from '@angular/core';

and then listening for popstate on the window object (as Adrian recommended):

  @HostListener('window:popstate', ['$event'])
  onPopState(event) {
    console.log('Back button pressed');
  }

This worked for me.