Bootstrap 4 navbar active class

I have started learning web programming as a project and I've been having a hard time with getting my links to show as active on the navbar. I did start by looking for similar questions asked in the past but none of the answers seemed to fix my problem.

Here is my code

<div>
<hr>
    <nav class="container-fluid navbar navbar-expand-sm bg-dark navbar-dark" style="padding-left: 75px; margin-top: -16px;">
        <ul class="navbar-nav">
            <li class="active nav-item">
                <a class="nav-link active" style = "padding-left: 0px; color: white;" href="#">Most Popular</a>
            </li>
            <li class="nav-item">
                <a class="nav-link" href="#" style="color: white">News</a>
            </li>
            <li class="nav-item">
                <a class="nav-link" href="#" style="color: white">Sports</a>
            </li>
            <li class="nav-item">
                <a class="nav-link" href="#" style="color: white">Science</a>
            </li>
            <li class="nav-item">
                <a class="nav-link" href="#" style="color: white">Politics</a>
            </li>
            <li class="nav-item">
                <a class="nav-link" href="#" style="color: white">Economics</a>
            </li>
            <li class="nav-item">
                <a class="nav-link" href="#" style="color: white">Random</a> 
            </li>
            <li class="nav-item">
                <a class="nav-link " style="padding-left: 480px; color: white; " href="#">Log in</a>
            </li>
        </ul>
    </nav>
</div>

and I tried using this javascript I found but it hasn't worked so far

$('.nav li').click(function(){
$('.nav li').removeClass('active');
$(this).addClass('active');
})

Hopefully, my code isn't too funky since I am just getting started. Any help would be tremendously appreciated thank you very much!

There are multiple issues...

1. The selector $('.nav li') does nothing because you have no .nav class used anywhere in the markup. It should be $('.navbar-nav .nav-link').
2. You have style="color:white" on the links which will override any changes you make with the active class.
3. You have no CSS for the active class, and by default Bootstrap active class on navbar-dark is going to be white. What color are you trying to set?
4. Set active in the nav-link instead of the li,

.navbar-dark .nav-item > .nav-link.active  {
    color:white;
}

$('.navbar-nav .nav-link').click(function(){
    $('.navbar-nav .nav-link').removeClass('active');
    $(this).addClass('active');
})

Demo: https://www.codeply.com/go/I3EjDb74My