jdmedlock / graphql-server

A demonstration server for GraphQL experiments

graphql-server

A demonstration server for GraphQL experiments

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Installation & setup

Overview

This project is a demonstration server for GraphQL experiments and is based on this article & repo.

It's purpose is to provide a place to test GraphQL techniques as well as the supporting technolgies and libraries like Data Loader & Objection.

Installation & setup

To install:

git clone https://github.com/jdmedlock/graphql-server
cd graphql-server
npm install

Database setup

Before continuing you'll need to install and configure a local PostgreSQL instance and create two databases - post and post-test.

You will also need to to create and authorize two user accounts in PostgreSQL as owners of theses databases databases. The default credentials can be found in /src/database/config.ts.

Now you are ready to initialize the Knex migrations & load the test data:

1. Generate the first Knex migration:

npx knex --knexfile ./src/database/knexfile.ts migrate:make -x ts initial

2. Start the server:

npm run dev

3. Prepare the DB:

Environment	Command	Description
Testing	npm run test:migrate:up	Run the Knex migration
Testing	npm run test:seed-db	Load test data into post-test DB
Production	npm run migrate:up	Run the Knex migration
Production	npm run seed-db	Load test data into post DB

4. Generate types:

npm run generate:types

Starting the Server

There are two ways to start the server:

1. As mentioned above, issue the npm run dev command from the terminal to start the server. This assumes that you have a PostgreSQL server started, listening on port 5432, and data loaded into the test & production tables.

2. The second option is to issue the npm run start-docker command from the terminal to start both a PostgreSQL server and the GraphQL server in a Docker container.

Regardless of which of these methods you choose the way you connect to this server remains the same.

Insomnia setup

At this point you are ready to fire up the Insomnia client so you can begin testing GraphQL queries.

You'll be sending your queries to http://localhost:3000/graphql via POST requests containing your GraphQL queries.

A workspace has been pre-configured and saved in the root of this repo, Insomnia_workspace.json. You may import this workspace into Insomnia to save yourself a bit of data entry.