Book Image

Hands-on Full-Stack Web Development with GraphQL and React

By : Sebastian Grebe
Book Image

Hands-on Full-Stack Web Development with GraphQL and React

By: Sebastian Grebe

Overview of this book

React, one of the most widely used JavaScript frameworks, allows developers to build fast and scalable front end applications for any use case. GraphQL is the modern way of querying an API. It represents an alternative to REST and is the next evolution in web development. Combining these two revolutionary technologies will give you a future-proof and scalable stack you can start building your business around. This book will guide you in implementing applications by using React, Apollo, Node.js and SQL. We'll focus on solving complex problems with GraphQL, such as abstracting multi-table database architectures and handling image uploads. Our client, and server will be powered by Apollo. Finally we will go ahead and build a complete Graphbook. While building the app, we'll cover the tricky parts of connecting React to the back end, and maintaining and synchronizing state. We'll learn all about querying data and authenticating users. We'll write test cases to verify the front end and back end functionality for our application and cover deployment. By the end of the book, you will be proficient in using GraphQL and React for your full-stack development requirements.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Back end debugging and logging

There are two things that are very important here: the first is that we need to implement logging for our back end in case we receive errors from our users, and the second is that we need to look into Postman to debug our GraphQL API efficiently.

So, let's get started with logging.

Logging in Node.js

The most popular logging package for Node.js is called winston. Configure winston by following the steps below:

  1. Install winston with npm:
npm install --save winston
  1. We create a new folder for all of the helper functions of the back end:
mkdir src/server/helpers
  1. Then, insert a logger.js file in the new folder with the following content:
import winston from 'winston';

let transports...