How To Create A Knex / Graphql Back End

With Node and Express

Step 1

Create a project directory. mkdir knex-graphql.

Then run yarn init. When it asks your for the main file, add src/index.js.

Now that have that ready we can star adding the dependencies we're going to need.

Graphql has a rich ecosystem with many amazing options. Feel free to experiment with the plethora of amazing graphql tools out there!

yarn add -D nodemon dotenv

yarn add express apollo-server-express graphql knex pg

There's a few things we don't want to push up to our GitHub repo. touch .gitignore in the root of your repo and add:

node_modules/
.env
yarn-error.log

Now that we have all our tools added, let's set up out database!

Step 2

Let's create a sql file and set up some scripts in our package.json.

touch remakeDatabase.sql

DROP DATABASE IF EXISTS my_db;

CREATE DATABASE my_db;

Open package.json and these scripts:

{
  "scripts": {
    "start": "node src/index.js",
    "server": "nodemon src/index.js",
    "db-remake": "psql -f remakeDatabase.sql"
  }
}

Now we can use the command yarn db-remake anytime we want to rollback our database.

Step 3

It's time to get knex set up! In root directory, run: knex init. We don't need everything in here, so we're just going to delete staging and testing environments and set knex up to work with postgres.

// knexfile.js
require("dotenv").config();

module.exports = {
  development: {
    client: "pg",
    connection: process.env.DATABASE_URL,
    migrations: {
      directory: "./src/data/migrations",
    },
    seeds: {
      directory: "./src/data/seeds",
    },
  },
};

We set our migration and build folders, let's make our data folder with the command mkdir src/data. Now that we have that in place, let's set up our migrations and seeds. 🌱

Run: knex migrate:make users_table && knex seed:make 01_users.

// migration file
exports.up = function (knex) {
  return knex.schema.createTable("users", (tbl) => {
    tbl.increments();
    tbl.text("username").notNullable();
    tbl.text("email").notNullable();
    tbl.boolean("admin").default(false);
  });
};

exports.down = function (knex) {
  return knex.schema.dropTableIfExists("users");
};

// seed file
exports.seed = function (knex) {
  // Deletes ALL existing entries
  return knex("users")
    .del()
    .then(function () {
      // Inserts seed entries
      return knex("users").insert([
        { id: 1, username: "rowValue1", email: "email1@email.com" },
        { id: 2, username: "rowValue2", email: "email2@email.com" },
        { id: 3, username: "rowValue3", email: "email3@email.com" },
      ]);
    });
};

We have our migrations and seeds set up now, let's run them and make sure everything is great. We can make our life a little easier by adding 2 more scripts to our package.json.

{
  "scripts": {
    "start": "node src/index.js",
    "server": "nodemon src/index.js",
    "db-remake": "psql -f remakeDatabase.sql",
    "knex-refresh": "knex migrate:rollback && knex migrate:latest && knex seed:run",
    "total-reset": "yarn db-remake && yarn knex-refresh"
  }
}

You probably we added knex-refresh and total-reset. Knex refresh command refreshes our migrations and runs our seeds in one command. If we make any changes to schema that breaks our postgres tables, we can just roll the whole thing back, database and all before we run our new migrations as seeds.

One final thing. We need to touch src/data/knexConfig.js and add the following code to it:

const knex = require("knex");
const knexConfig = require("../../knexfile");

module.exports = knex(knexConfig.development);

Step 4

In our package.json we have our main file set as src/index.js. Let's set that up. Run: mkdir src && touch src/index.js.

Before we set up our index.js, let's add a couple env variables we will need.

Create a .env file in the root of your project and add:

PORT = 4000
DATABASE_URL = postgres://postgres:password@localhost:5432/my_db

Now that that we have those variables in place, let's write some code! 🔥

// src/index.js
const { ApolloServer, gql } = require("apollo-server-express");
const express = require("express");

const db = require("./data/config");
const app = express();

require("dotenv").config();

const port = process.env.PORT;

// typeDefs is where we define what our schema looks like
const typeDefs = gql`
  type User {
    id: ID!
    username: String!
    email: String!
    admin: Boolean!
  }
  type Query {
    users: [User]!
    user(id: ID!): User!
  }
`;

// resolvers are where we put the logic to make our typeDefs come to life
const resolvers = {
  Query: {
    users(parent, args, ctx) {
      return db("users");
    },
    user(_, { id }) {
      return db("users").where({ id }).first();
    },
  },
};

const server = new ApolloServer({
  typeDefs,
  resolvers,
});

server.applyMiddleware({ app });

app.listen(port, () =>
  console.log(`🖥 Server ready on http://localhost:${port}/grahql 🔥🚀`)
);

And that's it! We have a fully functional graphql server up in minutes! 🔥 Woo hoo!

JimmyMcBride / knex-graphql