Before we start to build our server, we have a bit more preparations to do. After these our local environment will be ready.
First, we will install TypeScript. It is a superset of JavaScript which allows us to use types. Since GraphQL is type-safe why won't our code be type-safe as well?
Go ahead and add TypeScript to our dependencies:
npm i -D typescript or npm install --save-dev typescript to be verbose.
You might already noticed tsconfig.json file under our root folder. This configures the
TypeScript compiler. You don't need to worry about this one. If you want to know more about it
you can visit here
Next, we need ts-node package to be able to execute TypeScript code in node environment. I will show you how to use this in coming steps. For now, just add it to your dependencies.
npm i -D ts-node
Although, graphql-tools allows us to use GraphQL schema language and create our types
using strings, there is a better way to define our types and schema: Using .graphql files.
To be able to work with them add merge-graphql-schemas to your dependencies.
npm i -S merge-graphql-schemas
This relieves us from the burden of concatenating our types to provide them together to our
executable schema generator. Additionally, .graphql files are recognized by the IDE plugins
and allows us to navigate through our schema. WebStorm and VSCode have plugins for GraphQL.
Here are the links for the plugins. I strongly recommend you to install them:
Last but not least, graphql-codegen will help us to automatically generate TypeScript types
for both our server and client side applications. Add it to your dev dependencies.
npm i graphql-code-generator
Cool, now we are ready to start building our application! Proceed with the next step.
git checkout step-2
TIP: You can use the following command to add an alias for git checkout <branch> to shorten it like
git co <branch> We all like to type less :)
git config --global alias.co checkout