Book Image

Full-Stack Web Development with GraphQL and React - Second Edition

By : Sebastian Grebe
Book Image

Full-Stack Web Development with GraphQL and React - Second Edition

By: Sebastian Grebe

Overview of this book

React and GraphQL, when combined, provide you with a very dynamic, efficient, and stable tech stack to build web-based applications. GraphQL is a modern solution for querying an API that represents an alternative to REST and is the next evolution in web development. This book guides you in creating a full-stack web application from scratch using modern web technologies such as Apollo, Express.js, Node.js, and React. First, you’ll start by configuring and setting up your development environment. Next, the book demonstrates how to solve complex problems with GraphQL, such as abstracting multi-table database architectures and handling image uploads using Sequelize. You’ll then build a complete Graphbook from scratch. While doing so, you’ll cover the tricky parts of connecting React to the backend, and maintaining and synchronizing state. In addition to this, you’ll also learn how to write Reusable React components and use React Hooks. Later chapters will guide you through querying data and authenticating users in order to enable user privacy. Finally, you’ll explore how to deploy your application on AWS and ensure continuous deployment using Docker and CircleCI. By the end of this web development book, you'll have learned how to build and deploy scalable full-stack applications with ease using React and GraphQL.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Building the Stack
5
Section 2: Building the Application
14
Section 3: Preparing for Deployment

Authentication with SSR

You should have noticed that we have removed most of the authentication logic from the server-side React code. The reason for this is that localStorage cannot be transmitted to the server on the initial loading of a page, which is the only case where SSR can be used at all. This leads to the problem that we cannot render the correct route because we cannot verify whether a user is logged in. The authentication has to be transitioned to cookies, which are sent with every request.

It is important to understand that cookies also introduce some security issues. We will continue to use the regular HTTP authorization header for the GraphQL API that we have written. If we use cookies for the GraphQL API, we will expose our application to potential cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks. The frontend code continues to send all GraphQL requests with the HTTP authorization header.

We will only use the cookies to verify the authentication status of a user and...