Getting Started

Since this is a frontend track, we’re not going to spend any time implementing the backend. Instead, we’ll use the server from the Node tutorial.

Once our React application is created, we’ll pull in the required code for the backend.

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. Also note that each code block is annotated with a filename. These annotations directly link to the corresponding file on GitHub so you can clearly see where to put the code and what the end result will look like.

Frontend

Creating the app

The first step is to create a React project! As mentioned in the beginning, we’ll use create-react-app for that.

Note: This tutorial uses yarn for dependency management. Find instructions for how you can install it here. If you prefer using npm, you can just run the equivalent commands.

This will create a new directory called hackernews-react-apollo that has all the basic configuration setup.

Make sure everything works by navigating into the directory and starting the app:

cd hackernews-react-apollo
yarn start

This will open a browser and navigate to http://localhost:3000 where the app is running. If everything went well, we’ll see the following:

import React from 'react';
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom';
import './styles/index.css';
import App from './components/App';
import reportWebVitals from './reportWebVitals';

import logo from './../logo.svg';
import './../styles/App.css';

The project structure should now look as follows:

.
├── README.md
├── node_modules
├── package.json
├── public
│   ├── favicon.ico
│   ├── index.html
│   └── manifest.json
│   └── logo192.png
│   └── logo512.png
│   └── robot.txt
├── src
│   ├── components
│   │   └── App.js
│   │   └── App.test.js
│   ├── index.js
│   ├── logo.svg
│   ├── reportWebVitals.js
│   ├── setupTests.js
│   └── styles
│       ├── App.css
│       └── index.css
└── yarn.lock

Prepare Styling

This tutorial is about the concepts of GraphQL and how we can use it from within a React application, so we want to spend as little time as possible on styling. To reduce the usage of CSS in this project, we’ll use the Tachyons library which provides a number of CSS classes.

Since we still want to have a bit more custom styling, we also prepared some styles that need to be included in the project.

Install Apollo Client

Here’s an overview of the packages we installed:

• @apollo/client contains all the pieces needed to wire up the GraphQL client for our app. It exposes the ApolloClient, a provider to wrap around the React app called ApolloProvider, custom hooks such as useQuery, and much more.
• graphql contains Facebook’s reference implementation of GraphQL - Apollo Client uses some of its functionality within.

That’s it, we’re ready to write some code! 🚀

Configure ApolloClient

Apollo abstracts away all lower-level networking logic and provides a nice interface to the GraphQL server. In contrast to working with REST APIs, we don’t have to deal with constructing our own HTTP requests any more - instead we can simply write queries and mutations and send them using an ApolloClient instance.

The first thing we have to do when using Apollo is configure our ApolloClient instance. It needs to know the endpoint of our GraphQL API so it can deal with the network connections.

Let’s take a look at what’s going on in the code snippet above:

1. We import all the dependencies we need to wire up the Apollo client, all from @apollo/client.
2. We create the httpLink that will connect our ApolloClient instance with the GraphQL API. The GraphQL server will be running on http://localhost:4000.
3. We instantiate ApolloClient by passing in the httpLink and a new instance of an InMemoryCache.
4. Finally, we render the root component of our React app. The App is wrapped with the higher-order component ApolloProvider that gets passed the client as a prop.

That’s it, we’re all set to start for loading some data into our app! 😎

Backend

Downloading the Server Code

As mentioned above, for the backend in this tutorial we’ll simply use the final project from the Node tutorial.

Note: If you are on Windows, you may want to install Git CLI to avoid potential problems with commands such as curl.

We now have a new directory called server inside our project that contains all the code needed for our backend.

Before we start the server, let’s quickly understand the main components:

• prisma: This directory holds all the files that relate to our Prisma setup. Prisma Client is used to access the database in our GraphQL resolvers (similar to an ORM).

  • schema.prisma defines our data model for the project. It uses the Prisma Schema Language to define the shape of our databases tables and the relations between them.
  • dev.db is a SQLite database that will be used to store and retrieve data for this tutorial

• src: This directory holds the source files for our GraphQL server.

  • schema.graphql contains our application schema. The application schema defines the GraphQL operations we can send from the frontend. We’ll take a closer look at this file in just a bit.
  • resolvers contains the resolver functions for the operations defined in the application schema.
  • index.js is the entry point for our GraphQL server.

From the mentioned files, only the application schema defined in server/src/schema.graphql is relevant for you as a frontend developer. This file contains the GraphQL schema which defines all the operations (queries, mutations and subscriptions) we can send from your frontend app.

Here is what it looks like:

type Query {
  info: String!
  feed(filter: String, skip: Int, take: Int, orderBy: LinkOrderByInput): Feed!
}

type Feed {
  id: ID!
  links: [Link!]!
  count: Int!
}

type Mutation {
  post(url: String!, description: String!): Link!
  signup(email: String!, password: String!, name: String!): AuthPayload
  login(email: String!, password: String!): AuthPayload
  vote(linkId: ID!): Vote
}

type Subscription {
  newLink: Link
  newVote: Vote
}

type AuthPayload {
  token: String
  user: User
}

type User {
  id: ID!
  name: String!
  email: String!
  links: [Link!]!
}

type Link {
  id: ID!
  description: String!
  url: String!
  postedBy: User
  votes: [Vote!]!
  createdAt: DateTime!
}

type Vote {
  id: ID!
  link: Link!
  user: User!
}

input LinkOrderByInput {
  description: Sort
  url: Sort
  createdAt: Sort
}

enum Sort {
  asc
  desc
}

scalar DateTime

This schema allows for the following operations:

• Queries:

  • feed: Retrieves all links from the backend, note that this query also allows for filter, sorting and pagination arguments

• Mutations:

  • post: Allows authenticated users to create a new link
  • signup: Create an account for a new user
  • login: Login an existing user
  • vote: Allows authenticated users to vote for an existing link

• Subscriptions:

  • newLink: Receive realtime updates when a new link is created
  • newVote: Receive realtime updates when a vote was submitted

For example, we can send the following feed query to retrieve the first 10 links from the server:

{
  feed(skip: 0, take: 10) {
    links {
      description
      url
      postedBy {
        name
      }
    }
  }
}

Or the signup mutation to create a new user:

mutation {
  signup(name: "Sarah", email: "sarah@prisma.io", password: "graphql") {
    token
    user {
      id
    }
  }
}

Creating a Database and Generating Prisma Client

There is one thing left to do before we can start our server and begin sending queries and mutations to it. We need a database and a generated Prisma Client so that we can actually store and retrieve data.

Prisma supports several relational databases, including Postgres, MySQL, and SQLite.

For this tutorial, we’ll keep things simple and use SQLite. It’s a filesystem database that is very easy to get started with. It should be noted, however, that SQLite may not be suitable for production purposes.

There is a file called dev.db located in the server/prisma directory. This file is our SQLite database.

Note: You are free to use Postgres or MySQL for this tutorial if you prefer. All aspects of the tutorial will still work with those databases.

Next, let’s run database migrations and generate Prisma Client.