Introduction

Overview

GraphQL is the rising star of backend technologies. It’s a popular alternative for REST as an API design paradigm and is becoming the new standard for exposing the data and functionality of a web server.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to build a GraphQL HTTP server entirely from scratch.

You are going to use the following technologies:

• Node.js - as an engine and runtime for our server
• TypeScript - a strongly typed programming language that builds on JavaScript giving you better tooling at any scale
• graphql-yoga- the easiest way to build an HTTP GraphQL server
• graphql-js - we will use the core graphql library as execution engine for our server
• GraphiQL: A graphical interface that allows you to interactively explore the functionality of a GraphQL API by sending query, mutation and subscription operations. It’s somewhat similar to Postman which offers comparable functionality for REST APIs. Among other things, GraphiQL:
  • Auto-generates comprehensive documentation for all available API operations
  • Provides an editor where you can write queries, mutations & subscriptions with auto-complete and syntax highlighting
• SQLite: A lightweight and easy-to-use relational database management system for persisting data on the file system
• Prisma: The glue between your code and SQLite database. Use Prisma Client to access your database inside GraphQL resolvers

What to Expect

The goal of this tutorial is to build an API for a HackerNews clone.

Hackernews is a platform where people can share links to websites and people can comment on them.

Here is a quick rundown of what to expect from this tutorial.

You’ll start by learning the basics of how a GraphQL server works, simply by defining a GraphQL schema for the server and implementing your first GraphQL resolvers for posting links and retrieving a feed of links.

In the beginning, these resolvers will only work with data that are stored in memory - so nothing will persist beyond the runtime of the server.

Nobody wants a server that’s not able to store and persist data, right?

No worries! Next, you’re going to add a SQLite database to the project which will be accessed using the Prisma 3 ORM.

Once you have the database connected, you are going to add more features to the API.

You will implement comments on the links and introduce graph relations.

Afterward, you will learn all about the proper error and sanitizing invalid user input.

Finally, you’ll implement pagination and filtering capabilities to the API!

Let’s get started 🚀