Fullstack Prisma & Apollo

I'm building this to create a dead simple 'fullstack' example of Graphql. Its demonstrating React, Apollo, graphql-yoga, and Prisma.

Whenever I come to these kind of examples I always look to see how they handle user authentication, so all this app does is handles user signup and login. It persists user state using a session cookie, the goal is for this to serve a good base template to add whatever flavor or application on top of it.

Prerequisites

Install dependencies with npm install or yarn install.

Be sure to have prisma and nodemon installed globally.

npm install -g prisma graphql-cli nodemon

yarn global prisma graphql-cli nodemon

Generating Prisma

After logging into Prisma's CLI:

prisma deploy database

Select Demo server which will give you an endpoint like https://us1.prisma.sh/myusername-12345/my-project/dev.

Place a .env file in the database folder listing the variables in database/prisma.yml. For example:

APP_SECRET=mysecret123
DB_URL=https://us1.prisma.sh/myusername-12345/my-project/dev

Running the dev server

node src/index.js

Then go to localhost:4000 to access the playground.

Authorization

I'm saving the user's id in a session using express-session. graphql-yoga https://github.com/prisma/graphql-yoga/tree/master/examples/authentication/express-session

Why Sessions

Many examples of using Apollo or graphql demonstrate saving a the user's JWT packet in respnse header or ... localstorage 😳. After reading quite a few posts on the subject, I wanted to show a production ready, battle tested solution like sessions. This required a few caveats in the codebase such as query for checking if the user is logged in on page load.