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

Using Sequelize with GraphQL

The database object is initialized upon starting the server within the root index.js file. We pass it from this global location down to the spots where we rely on the database. This way, we do not import the database file repeatedly but have a single instance that handles all the database queries for us.

The services that we want to publicize through the GraphQL API need access to our MySQL database. The first step is to implement the posts in our GraphQL API. It should respond with the fake posts from the database we just inserted.

Global database instance

To pass the database down to our GraphQL resolvers, we must create a new object in the server index.js file:

import db from './database';
const utils = {
  db,
};

Here, we created a utils object directly under the import statement of the database folder.

The utils object holds all the utilities that our services might need access to. This can be anything from third...