CoinTrack - Personal Finance Dashboard 🫡

CoinTrack is a sleek and modern full-stack MERN application designed to help users take control of their finances. With a beautiful, animated user interface, it provides a seamless experience for tracking income and expenses, visualizing spending habits, and managing monthly recurring costs. This project was built from the ground up to showcase a complete range of modern web development skills.

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✨ Features

• Secure User Authentication: Full user registration and login system using JWT (JSON Web Tokens) for secure, stateless authentication.
• Full CRUD Operations: Users can Create, Read, Update, and Delete their financial transactions.
• Interactive Dashboard: A central hub displaying key financial summaries, a list of recent transactions, and an interactive expense chart.
• Multi-Currency Support: Live currency conversion using the ExchangeRate-API. Users can view their entire financial picture in any currency, and the selection is saved across sessions.
• Recurring Expense Management: Users can save common monthly expenses (like rent or subscriptions) and apply them to the current month's transactions with a single click.
• Data Visualization: An elegant pie chart provides a clear and immediate breakdown of expenses by category.
• Stunning UI/UX: Built with Tailwind CSS and Framer Motion, the application features a modern, responsive design with smooth animations and a beautiful "space" theme for an engaging user experience.
• Professional State Management: Uses Redux Toolkit for predictable and scalable state management across the entire application.

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🛠️ Tech Stack

Frontend:

• React: A JavaScript library for building user interfaces.
• Vite: A lightning-fast frontend build tool.
• Redux Toolkit: The standard for efficient and predictable state management.
• React Router: For client-side routing and navigation.
• Tailwind CSS: For utility-first styling and a beautiful, responsive design.
• Framer Motion: For fluid, declarative animations.
• Axios: For making HTTP requests to the backend API.
• Chart.js: For creating beautiful and interactive data visualizations.

Backend:

• Node.js: A JavaScript runtime for the server.
• Express: A fast, unopinionated, minimalist web framework for Node.js.
• MongoDB: A NoSQL database for storing application data, accessed via Mongoose.
• Mongoose: An Object Data Modeling (ODM) library for MongoDB and Node.js.
• JWT (jsonwebtoken): For creating and verifying secure access tokens.
• bcryptjs: For hashing user passwords before storing them.

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🚀 Getting Started

To get a local copy up and running, follow these simple steps.

Prerequisites

• Node.js (which includes npm) installed on your machine.
• A MongoDB Atlas account (or a local MongoDB instance).
• An API key from ExchangeRate-API.com.

Installation & Setup

Clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/cointrack.git
cd cointrack

Backend Setup:

cd server
npm install

Create a .env file in the server directory and add your secret keys:

MONGO_URI=YOUR_MONGODB_CONNECTION_STRING
JWT_SECRET=YOUR_SUPER_SECRET_KEY
EXCHANGE_RATE_API_KEY=YOUR_EXCHANGERATEAPI_KEY

Start the backend server:

npm run dev

The server will be running on http://localhost:5001

Frontend Setup:

cd client
npm install
npm run dev

The app will open in your browser at http://localhost:5173 (or another available port).