In this tutorial you will learn how to set up a simple, yet pretty customizable star rating component in React. You know those little stars that you use to rate stuff all over the internet? We will build those as a default use-case, but we will also add support for other text-based and emoji-based icons that you can use instead of little yellow stars.

If you would prefer a video version of this tutorial you can watch me build this component in React on Youtube:

I started a new React app through Vite by running:

yarn create vite

If you don't use yarn you can find detailed scaffolding instructions on Vite's Getting Started page.

For this component we won't use any additional libraries, so we can jump straight into it.

I created a file for my component and I called it Stars.jsx. I also created a separate styles file which I called Stars.css. Since this is a simple mini project I've left them in the /src/ folder, so if you are plugging these into your existing project you will have to make some adjustments.

I started off by adding some simple CSS to my App.css file, which I used to set up the page background color and to center stuff on screen. If you plan to add this component to an existing project you can skip this step.

//App.css

body {
  background: rgb(39, 39, 39);
  color: white;
}

#root {
  max-width: 1280px;
  margin: 0 auto;
  text-align: center;

  height: 100vh;
  display: flex;
  justify-content: center;
  align-items: center;
}

We will initialize the Stars.jsx component and add some default properties and props to it.

// Stars.jsx

import "./Stars.css";

const DEFAULT_COUNT = 5;
const DEFAULT_ICON = "★";
const DEFAULT_UNSELECTED_COLOR = "grey";
const DEFAULT_COLOR = "yellow";

export default function Stars({ count, defaultRating, icon, color, iconSize }) {
  return (
    <div className="starsContainer"></div>
  );
}

The idea here is that we want our use-case to be the 5/5 yellow star rating component, so we need to set up our default properties to reflect that. We will continue with setting up our state and mapping out an appropriate number of stars.

// Stars.jsx

import "./Stars.css";
import { useState } from "react";

const DEFAULT_COUNT = 5;
const DEFAULT_ICON = "★";
const DEFAULT_UNSELECTED_COLOR = "grey";
const DEFAULT_COLOR = "yellow";

export default function Stars({ count, defaultRating, icon, color, iconSize }) {
  const [rating, setRating] = useState(defaultRating);
  const [temporaryRating, setTemporaryRating] = useState(0);

  let stars = Array(count || DEFAULT_COUNT).fill(icon || DEFAULT_ICON);

  return (
    <div className="starsContainer">
      {stars.map((item, index) => {
        return (
          <div className="star" key={index}>
            {icon ? icon : DEFAULT_ICON}
          </div>
        );
      })}
    </div>
  );
}

We will use temporaryRating as a helper property to visually display which rating will be set once we click on a star, and we will track that final rating in the rating property.

We are setting up an array which has the number of elements that we need and we are mapping through it to create new elements which contain our stars, or a different icon that we've set. Now would be an appropriate time to quickly jump into our Stars.css file and add some very light CSS which will fix our stars not being properly positioned.

.starsContainer {
  display: flex;
}

.star {
  cursor: pointer;
  transition: all 0.1s linear;
}

.star:hover {
  transform: scale(1.1);
}

I told you it's going to be light. We are just adding flex to our container to make the stars fit in a single row by default. We are also adding a slight transition effect on hover where we are bumping the icon size a bit when me mouse over it.

We can now go back to the component. Our next order of business is to determine when and how to change our icon color from grey to yellow (or any other color that you've set up through props).

// .starsContainer in Stars.jsx

<div className="starsContainer">
  {stars.map((item, index) => {
    const isActiveColor =
      (rating || temporaryRating) &&
      (index < rating || index < temporaryRating);

    let elementColor = "";

    if (isActiveColor) {
      elementColor = color || DEFAULT_COLOR;
    } else {
      elementColor = DEFAULT_UNSELECTED_COLOR;
    }

    return (
      <div className="star" key={index}>
        {icon ? icon : DEFAULT_ICON}
      </div>
    );
  })}
</div>

We will use isActiveColor as a helper property to figure out when should the icon have the "active" color. There are two main parts to it.

The first one says we need to have a rating or a temporary rating. If we don't have any rating set up then there is no need to change the color of any icon. The rating covers the use-case of loading the component which already has its state set up, and the temporaryRating covers the use-case of using our mouse to hover the component and preview the rating which we want to set.

The second part compares our current icon's index to rating and temporaryRating. Since array index in JavaScript starts from 0 we need to make sure the index has a strictly smaller value then our two ratings. For example, if our rating is 1/5 we need to color just the first star, which has the index of 0, which is smaller than 1.

Now that we know when the icon should have the "active" color we can use elementColor as a helper property to set the appropriate color. If we've passed in the color prop we will use that, otherwise we will use the DEFAULT_COLOR. If "active" color does not need to be set then we use the DEFAULT_UNSELECTED_COLOR. We can now proceed with actually using these properties to change the look of our icons.

// return statement in Stars.jsx

return (
  <div
    className="star"
    key={index}
    style={{
      fontSize: iconSize ? `${iconSize}px` : "14px",
      color: elementColor,
      filter: `${isActiveColor ? "grayscale(0%)" : "grayscale(100%)"}`,
    }}
  >
    {icon ? icon : DEFAULT_ICON}
  </div>
);

Remember we want to cover both the text based icons such as ★ or ❤, but also emoji based icons such as 🌷 or 😍. To do this we can add the style prop and directly set the color to our elementColor. This covers the text icons, but won't affect the emojis which are going to render in their full color. For that we need to conditionally set the filter to grayscale(100%) when the "active" color isn't being set, which will grey out emojis, or to grayscale(0%) when we are setting the "active" color, but in this case we are just resetting the filter.

Technically, you could go just with the filter approach and ditch the elementColor, which will work on the text based icons as well, but the shade of grey will depend on the active color, so your icons might look brighter or darker depending on which base color you chose.

Additionally, we are setting our fontSize to an appropriate value if we passed in the iconSize prop. If not we are setting it to 14px by default, which you could also separate into its own DEFAULT_ICON_SIZE property if you wanted to.

Next step is to make these colors apply on hover and on click.

// return statement in Stars.jsx

return (
  <div
    className="star"
    key={index}
    style={{
      fontSize: iconSize ? `${iconSize}px` : "14px",
      color: elementColor,
      filter: `${isActiveColor ? "grayscale(0%)" : "grayscale(100%)"}`,
    }}
    onMouseEnter={() => setTemporaryRating(index + 1)}
    onMouseLeave={() => setTemporaryRating(0)}
    onClick={() => handleClick(index + 1)}
  >
    {icon ? icon : DEFAULT_ICON}
  </div>
);

When we mouse over the icons we need to set and reset our temporaryRating. When we first hover it we use onMouseEnter to set the temporaryRating to index + 1 because, as you remember, our index will always be 1 lower than the actual rating. Once we move our mouse outside of the icon we use onMouseLeave to set temporaryRating back to 0, so it doesn't get stuck on the last hovered value.

Finally, we use onClick to call a new function called handleClick which will set the final rating to index + 1. Inside of this function we will also store our final value in localStorage so it will persist afer refreshing the page. Here is what that function looks like.

// handleClick function in Stars.jsx

const handleClick = (rating) => {
  setRating(rating);
  localStorage.setItem("starRating", rating);
};

We are doing this just for this example, to show what would be the final behavior for a single component. In production you would need to modify this to connect to your actual database where you keep the record of all of your different ratings. Otherwise, all your rating components will be set to the same value. Here is the final look of the full Stars.jsx file.

// Stars.jsx

import "./Stars.css";
import { useState } from "react";

const DEFAULT_COUNT = 5;
const DEFAULT_ICON = "★";
const DEFAULT_UNSELECTED_COLOR = "grey";
const DEFAULT_COLOR = "yellow";

export default function Stars({ count, defaultRating, icon, color, iconSize }) {
  const [rating, setRating] = useState(defaultRating);
  const [temporaryRating, setTemporaryRating] = useState(0);

  let stars = Array(count || DEFAULT_COUNT).fill(icon || DEFAULT_ICON);

  const handleClick = (rating) => {
    setRating(rating);
    localStorage.setItem("starRating", rating);
  };

  return (
    <div className="starsContainer">
      {stars.map((item, index) => {
        const isActiveColor =
          (rating || temporaryRating) &&
          (index < rating || index < temporaryRating);

        let elementColor = "";

        if (isActiveColor) {
          elementColor = color || DEFAULT_COLOR;
        } else {
          elementColor = DEFAULT_UNSELECTED_COLOR;
        }

        return (
          <div
            className="star"
            key={index}
            style={{
              fontSize: iconSize ? `${iconSize}px` : "14px",
              color: elementColor,
              filter: `${isActiveColor ? "grayscale(0%)" : "grayscale(100%)"}`,
            }}
            onMouseEnter={() => setTemporaryRating(index + 1)}
            onMouseLeave={() => setTemporaryRating(0)}
            onClick={() => handleClick(index + 1)}
          >
            {icon ? icon : DEFAULT_ICON}
          </div>
        );
      })}
    </div>
  );
}

Final thing left is to actually use our new component. In my example I will just import it to my App.jsx alongside a localStorage check to see if we already have a defaultRating that we need to pass in.

// App.jsx

import "./App.css";
import Stars from "./Stars";

function App() {
  const defaultRating = localStorage.getItem("starRating");

  return (
    <Stars defaultRating={defaultRating} />
  );
}

export default App;

To test out other props and customize your new rating component you can try one of these setups, or a combination of them.

<Stars icon="❤" color="red" defaultRating={defaultRating} /> // 5/5 red hearts component
<Stars icon="😍" defaultRating={defaultRating} /> // 5/5 smiley face with hearts for its eyes component
<Stars icon="🌷" defaultRating={defaultRating} count={10} /> // 10/10 flower component

And with that our (star) rating component is finished. It is light and fairly customizable, but depending on your use-case you might want to add more functionalities or customizations to it. Technically, this component will work with svg files and images, but you will need to take care of resizing them with CSS.

Have fun with messing around with it, and if you do end up using or even improving this component send me a message, as I would love to see and hear about your creations!

If you have any questions or comments you can reach out to me on Twitter and Instagram, where I also post interesting code tidbits and designs.

I also have a YouTube channel where I regularly upload React and web dev tutorials, so if that's your cup of tea feel free to support me by subscribing.