We’re going to deploy a GraphQL instance on Heroku. Since, as I mentioned in Part 0, graphQL is really just a standard, we have to pick a particular version of a GraphQL server to use. Like most people we’ll use the biggest project, Apollo GraphQL. You can get Apollo GraphQL in a number of languages, but we’ll use the JavaScript version.
- Create a Heroku App
Before you start, take just two steps:
- Setup a Heroku account
- Install the Heroku CLI
The plan here is to create a heroku app to contain our GraphQL server, then we’ll download the Apollo GraphQL engine, and commit it to our Heroku app.
Before deploying, a new application must be setup. To do this, log into the Heroku dashboard. Then click New > Create New App in the top right. The name you choose will be referred to later as <HEROKU_APP_NAME>, so be sure to replace it in the later sections. I chose to use heroku-graphql-toby so that’s the name that will appear in later commands. I assure you this app name isn’t magic and you can use whatever you’d like. Well, with an exception: since your app will get a nice Heroku URL at the end of this process, the app name has to be unique! Once you’ve found a unique name click ‘Create App’ to get started.
- Create the app on your laptop
Now it’s time to create the app that we’re going to ‘push’ up to Heroku in a few moments.
A word here on technique: I use the command line a lot. I do this because it looks a lot cooler than doing stuff in a file browser. Sometimes I do it for silly things like creating a file with the command,
>> index.js>I mean come on doesn't that look cool??
Start by