GRANDstack Starter

npx create-grandstack-app myNewApp

This project is a starter for building a GRANDstack (GraphQL, React, Apollo, Neo4j Database) application. There are two components to the starter, the web frontend application (in React and Angular flavors) and the API app (GraphQL server).

The starter represents a business reviews dashboard. You need to adjust the GraphQL schema, the seed data, database index creation, and the UI components for your use-case.

Hands On With The GRANDstack Starter Video

Quickstart

The easiest way to get started with the GRANDstack Starter is to create a Neo4j Sandbox instance and use the create-grandstack-app command line tool.

(If you have a running Neo4j database on localhost via Neo4j Desktop or a Neo4j server installation, change the password in api/.env)

1. Create A Neo4j Instance

Option 1️⃣ - Sandbox

Neo4j Sandbox allows you to create a free hosted Neo4j instance private to you that can be used for development.

After singing in to Neo4j Sandbox, click the + New Project button and select the "Blank Sandbox" option. In the next step we'll use the connection credentials from the "Connection details" tab to connect our GraphQL API to this Neo4j instance.

Option 2️⃣ - Desktop

If you instead would like to use Neo4j Desktop. The process will be almost the same with a minor detour. Install Neo4j Desktop for your chosen OS and then make a new blank graph for your project. It will require you to put in a password and username. Remember those.

Next you need to go to open the manage screen from the options in the 3 dot stack menu

And install the apoc plugin, green button at the top of the list.

After that you can return to setting up your app with the credentials from the prior steps.

2. Run the `create-grandstack-app` CLI

npx create-grandstack-app myNewApp

or with Yarn

yarn create grandstack-app myNewApp

This will create a new directory myNewApp, download the latest release of the GRANDstack Starter, install dependencies and prompt for your connection credentials for Neo4j to connect to the GraphQL API.

3. Seed the database (optional)

Make sure your application is running locally with npm start or yarn start, open another terminal and run

npm run seedDb

or with Yarn

yarn run seedDb

4. Open In Browser

Overview

The GRANDstack Starter is a monorepo that includes a GraphQL API application and client web applications for React (default) and Angular for a business reviews dashboard.

`/` - Project Root

The root directory contains some global configuration and scripts:

npm run start and npm run build
ESLint (.eslintrc.json) for code linting
Prettier (.prettierrc.json) for code formatting
Git hooks for applying formatting on commit

`/api`

This directory contains the GraphQL API application using Apollo Server and neo4j-graphql.js.

Change environment variable settings in .env:

# Use this file to set environment variables with credentials and configuration options
# This file is provided as an example and should be replaced with your own values
# You probably don't want to check this into version control!

NEO4J_URI=bolt://localhost:7687
NEO4J_USER=neo4j
NEO4J_PASSWORD=letmein

# Uncomment this line to enable encrypted driver connection for Neo4j
#NEO4J_ENCRYPTED=true

# Uncomment this line to specify a specific Neo4j database (v4.x+ only)
#NEO4J_DATABASE=neo4j

GRAPHQL_SERVER_HOST=0.0.0.0
GRAPHQL_SERVER_PORT=4001
GRAPHQL_SERVER_PATH=/graphql

`/web-react`

The frontend React web application is found in this directory.

It includes:

Material UI
React router
Apollo Client / React Hooks
Create React App

`/web-angular`

A UI built with Angular, Apollo and the Clarity Design System is also available.

Start the Angular UI server

cd ./web-angular && npm start

`/mobile_client_flutter`

A mobile client built with Flutter which supports Android, iOS, and web. See the README for detailed setup instructions.

cd ./mobile_client_flutter && flutter run

`/web-react-ts`

A UI built with CRA

Start the React dev server

cd ./web-react-ts && npm start

Deployment

Netlify

This monorepo can be deployed to Netlify. The frontend application will be served over Netlify's CDN and the GraphQL API will be provisioned as a serverless GraphQL API lambda function deployed to AWS (via Netlify). A netlify.toml file is included with the necessary build configurations. The following environment variables must be set in Netlify (either via the Netlify web UI or via the command line tool)

NEO4J_URI
NEO4J_USER
NEO4J_PASSWORD

See the "Hands On With The GRANDStack Starter" video linked at the beginning of this README for a walkthrough of deploying to Netlify.

Vercel

Vercel can be used with monorepos such as grand-stack-starter. vercel.json defines the configuration for deploying with Vercel.

get vercel cli
Set the vercel secrets for your Neo4j instance:

vercel secret add grand_stack_starter_neo4j_uri bolt://<YOUR_NEO4J_INSTANCE_HERE>
vercel secret add grand_stack_starter_neo4j_user <YOUR_DATABASE_USERNAME_HERE>
vercel secret add grand_stack_starter_neo4j_password <YOUR_DATABASE_USER_PASSWORD_HERE>

Run vercel

Docker Compose

You can quickly start via:

docker-compose up -d

If you want to load the example DB after the services have been started:

docker-compose run api npm run seedDb

See the project releases for the changelog.

You can find instructions for other ways to use Neo4j (Neo4j Desktop, Neo4j Aura, and other cloud services) in the Neo4j directory README.

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