Create a React app with Airtable and Material UI

About this guide

This development guide walks you through everything you need to do to build a high-quality React app integrated with Airtable and Material UI. Check out the tasks below to get started. To save time, you can also use our boilerplate, which gives you a complete React codebase with all of these tasks done for you. Okay, let's dive in!

Tasks

• Setup your React appGet the code

  Setup a React app using npx create-react-app and routing using React Router. There are many ways you can structure your app, but a common setup is to have an App component that defines top-level routes, with each route component imported from the /pages directory. The rest of your components should be located in your /components directory. You can then run your app locally with the npm run start command.

• Setup a Node (Express.js) serverGet the code

  This stack requires server logic, so we'll be setting up a Node (Express.js) server that we can query from our React front-end. We suggest defining your Express.js routes in a file located at /api/index.js and then creating a file for each route handler in the/api directory. Next make sure all requests to /api/* get routed to your Express server port by defining a proxy in your package.json. Lastly, run your server with the node api command in a new terminal window.

• Build your Airtable contact formGet the code

  Create a contact form powered by Airtable and Material UI components. You'll need to create an Express.js route at /api/contact that is passed the form data and writes to Airtable. You can then respond manually to any messages and mark them as replied to. Make sure your form properly validates inputs and display any errors returned by Airtable.

• Ensure Material UI link components hook into React RouterGet the code

  Make all Material UI link components hook into React Router by using the component prop and setting the value to Link from react-router-dom.

• Create a persistent layoutGet the code

  Add any components that you'd like displayed across all pages (such asNavbar and Footer) to your App component. If you need multiple persistent layouts you can instead have each page define its own layout. In that case, create multiple layout components (such as LandingPageLayout and AdminLayout) and wrap the contents of each page.

• Add a Material UI ThemeProviderGet the code

  Add the Material UI ThemeProvider component so that you customize theme values. If your entire app uses the same theme (as opposed to different nested themes), then the best way to do this is update your App component so that ThemeProviderwraps all your pages.

• Add dark mode supportGet the code

  To support dark mode you'll need to define a light and dark Material UI theme object, read the user's preference from local storage on mount, fall back to their browser default using prefers-color-scheme, and pass the correct theme object to ThemeProvider. You'll also want to create a useDarkMode React hook that any component can call to get/toggle the user's preference. Be sure to check out our example Material UI components with dark mode toggle.

• ‍Finish your app UI with Material UIGet the code

  Build out the rest of your UI using Material UI components and composing them into high-level page sections, such as HeroSection and AccountSettings. Use Material UI's CSS-in-JS solution for styling your components and overriding default component styles. You should find our library of pre-built Material UI components to be helpful.

Get the code

You can get the code for this guide with our React, Airtable, and Material UI Boilerplate. You'll get a complete React codebase with Airtable and Material UI integration, all the tasks listed above done for you, and a responsive multi-page template. It should save you about two weeks of development time.

Get the boilerplate