GraphQL

NodeJS GraphQL: Introduction to building GraphQL API with Node and Express #1

This is the first tutorial of the tutorial series. This tutorial guides you through building a fully-featured GraphQL-server from scratch

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Published · May 3 2020

Welcome! This tutorial guides you through building a fully-featured GraphQL-server from scratch. We will be building an example that's closer to "Real World", complete with authentication, subscriptions, pagination, and more.

  
If you are new to the GraphQL, it is recommended that you go through below tutorial to understand the concepts of GraphQL before starting this tutorial series :  A Comprehensive Guide to Learn GraphQL & Its Core Concepts with examples

Note: The final project for this tutorial can be found on Github. You can always use it as a reference whenever you get lost throughout the course of the following chapters. 

Ready? Let's dive in!  🚀
. . .
Overview
GraphQL is the rising star of backend technologies. It replaces REST as an API design paradigm and is becoming the new standard for exposing the data and functionality of a server.  In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to build an idiomatic GraphQL server entirely from scratch. You are going to use the following technologies:
Express for building the webserver in NodeJS
Apollo-server: Fully-featured GraphQL server with a focus on easy setup, performance & great developer experience. 
node-jsonwebtoken: for implementing the json web token authentication into our application
GraphQL Playground: “GraphQL IDE” that allows to interactively explore the functionality of a GraphQL API by sending queries and mutations to it. 
. . .
What to expect
The goal of this tutorial is to build an API for Star Wars. Here is a quick rundown of what to expect in this tutorial.  

You’ll start by learning the basics of how a GraphQL server works, simply by defining a GraphQL schema for the server and writing corresponding resolver functions.  

You’ll start by implementing signup/login functionality that enables users to authenticate against the API. This will also allow you to check the permissions of your users for certain API operations.  

The next part of the tutorial is about adding realtime functionality to your API using GraphQL subscriptions.

Lastly, you’ll allow the consumers of the API to constrain the list of items they retrieve from the API by adding filtering and pagination capabilities to it.

complete list of chapters in this tutorial series can be found below:
Introduction to building GraphQL API with Node and Express #1
Setting up GraphQL Server with Node and Express #2
Writing the GraphQL Query and Resolvers #3
Implementing the GraphQL Mutations #4
Handling GraphQL Errors in NodeJS #5
Adding JWT Authentication to GraphQL API in NodeJS #6
Adding Realtime GraphQL Subscriptions in NodeJS and Express #7
Searching, Filtering, and Pagination in GraphQL API #8
. . .
Prerequisites
This tutorial assumes that you're familiar with both Python & GraphQL. If you need to brush up on GraphQL, we recommend going through the tutorial.  Let’s get started 🚀
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Up next:  Setting up GraphQL Server with Node and Express #2

Final code for this tutorials can be found Github