Graphql Lambda Setup

This repo exists to show a basic setup for a graphql lambda running on netlify.

Included in this setup

• A barebones webpack build which bundles the graphql dependencies and enables the use of the import syntax (this was done just for proof of concept for bundling).
• A way to test your graphql lambda locally
• A way to deploy it to netlify and have it be accessble by anyone (fixing a cors issue)

Installation

(Some prerequisites of this walkthrough/repo are having a netlify account and netlify cli installed)

Clone this repo

$ cd graphql-lambda-setup
$ npm install

You can now alter the schema.js, resolvers.js and /datasources under the functions/graphql folder.

Any javascript file that lives at the root of the "functions" folder will be exposed as a lambda when you deploy your project to netlify. For this project webpack bundles our graphql and puts a graphql.js file at the root of the /functions folder exposing it as an api endpint.

Testing Locally

At the root of the project

npm run build npm run dev

Your graphql function should be available on http://localhost:34567/.netlify/functions/graphql when testing this way, you will see graphiql

What this is really doing is bundling the graphql code with webpack and then invoking netlify dev which creates an environment thats as close to the netlify (AWS) lambda environment as possible, but with some pit falls. Netlify Dev Docs

Deploying

Depending on how you want to deploy it will consist of a few steps.

netlify login

Then you will initialize your repo as a netlify site (Note: you want to select Create & configure a new site)

netlify init

you will be walked through a project initialization, follow it. Then if you hooked up a github repo you will have a deploy hook that deploys your site each time you push a commit. Alternatively you can delpoy previews with:

netlify deploy

This will run the "[build]" step in our netlify.toml and deploy to a hashed testing site. To deploy to production manually you can do:

netlify deploy -p

However when deploying this way you'll need to npm install in the functions folder first as it will zip up your depenedancies along with your code.

Closing

You can remove the webpack from this project, its not really needed and adds awkward complexity, I just added it as a proof of concept to show that with netlify functions we can have a decent build step. There also wasn't any straightforward documentation on graphql lambda's in netlify so here you go, have fun! 🚀