While building a web application to track my physical activities I have learned many things which I will share with you in this tutorial.

Live demo:
https://master.d3963aoi020v9l.amplifyapp.com/

This tutorial is targeted for beginners in React who already have experience using ES6 and create-react-app. We will be using:

• 100% React Hooks, Router and Context API

• Firebase Authentication and noSQL database

• Material UI components

This tutorial is divided up in to the following sections:

1. Setting up our project

2. User authentication with Firebase

3. Creating a custom Calendar component

4. Adding, updating and deleting workouts with noSQL database

5. Deployment

1. Project setup

We will start with creating the new project folder and installing all needed dependencies. I’m using Visual Studio Code, with the shortcut CTRL + ~ you can toggle the command line inside Visual Studio Code. Run the following command:

npx-create-react-app activity-tracker

This will create a new folder with our new react app.

Then delete all the files in /src except App.js, App.css, Index.js, Index.css

Inside App.js: delete the logo import, remove everything inside the return and add

Hello World!

Inside Index.js: delete the serviceworker import and unregister line. Now run npm run start to check if the app displays Hello World!

Material UI

To speed up our development we will use pre-build components from Material-UI framework which you can find here: https://material-ui.com/

Run the following commands:

npm install @material-ui/core
npm install @material-ui/icons

Folders

Next up we will create our folders, which will be: components, pages and config. Open up command prompt and use the following commands:

cd src
mkdir components pages config

This way we have our app running in the command line of Visual Code and can run command with command prompt separately.

Router

To navigate inside our App we will use react-router. We are creating a single-page-application which is basically one big page that does not need to be refreshed, we will just show and load only the components we want the user to see.

Install react-router by running the command:

npm install react-router-dom

Then inside App.js we will import react-router and add a switch to navigate between paths. We will create a path for home “/” and a path for signing up “/sign-up”:

Now you should see “Signin” in your browser and if you’ll browse to /sign-up you should see “Signup”. Great, our router is working!

In part 2 we will actually start building our application and adding authentication.

Checkout the final result: https://master.d2e0orovu8bxyk.amplifyapp.com/**
**Source code: https://github.com/sanderdebr/workout-tracker