Create a React app with Cloud Firestore

About this guide

This development guide walks you through everything you need to do to build a high-quality React app integrated with Cloud Firestore. 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.

• Create Cloud Firestore query hooksGet the code

  Create React hooks that wrap your Cloud Firestore queries, such as useUser, useItem, and useItemsByUser. These hooks should subscribe to data using onSnapshot and return a query status of "success", "loading", or "error". The React Query library makes it especially easy to setup these hooks and have components re-render when data changes.

• Add Firestore rulesGet the code

  Be sure to specify your Firestore security rules so that your Firestore database is secure. For example, if you have a users collection you might ensure that the authenticated user can only update a doc if userDoc.uid matches their uid. If you have an items collection you might ensure that they can only update and fetch items where itemDoc.owner matches their uid. You'll also generally want to specify an array of fields that are writeable, as you wouldn't want a user to be able to change userDoc.planId without actually upgrading their plan.

• Build a data-driven UIGet the code

  Create a data-driven UI using your component library of choice that reads/writes data to Cloud Firestore. The specifics will depend on the type of app you're building, but we generally recommend having a useItemsByOwner hook that fetches "items" in Cloud Firestore that are owned by the current user. You can then create a component for displaying that data in a simple list or table if more columns are needed. Finally, you'll want create a flow for creating and updating items utilizing modal and form components.

Get the code

You can get the code for this guide with our React and Cloud Firestore Boilerplate. You'll get a complete React codebase with Cloud Firestore 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