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

Getting started with Node.js and Express.js

One of the primary goals of this book is to set up a GraphQL API, which is then consumed by our React frontend. To accept network requests – especially GraphQL requests – we are going to set up a Node.js web server.

The most significant competitors in the Node.js web server area are Express.js, Koa, and Hapi. In this book, we are going to use Express.js. Most tutorials and articles about Apollo rely on it.

Express.js is also the most used Node.js web server out there and describes itself as a Node.js web framework, offering all the main features needed to build web applications.

Installing Express.js is easy. We can use npm in the same way as we did in the previous chapter:

npm install --save express

This command adds the latest version of Express to package.json.

In the previous chapter, we created all the JavaScript files directly in the src/client folder. Now, let's create a separate folder for our...