This course has been updated! We now recommend you take the Server-Side GraphQL in Node.js course.
Transcript from the "Introduction" Lesson
[00:00:03]
>> Scott Moss: Today we're gonna be diving into building APIs with GraphQL. In the previous course we did it with REST, today's gonna be GraphQL, so there will be some similarities if you've taken the REST course, as far as resources we use but it's a whole different paradigm we'll using that.
[00:00:21] So, first thing first is let's go over the course in the curriculum. So, if you head over to GitHub you can go ahead and clone this repo which will be intro to GraphQL, so go ahead and clone that. And as far as dependencies, it's very much like the API design with the REST, you're just gonna need at least Node version six, MongoDB, and Git, that's basically it that's all you're gonna need.
[00:00:52] So if you have all those, you're good to go, if you don't have Mongo, I do recommend installing it you can install it from the MongoDB website. They have installation instructions for all different platforms you can also use mLab to use a hosted one, they have a pretty easy setup.
[00:01:13] You can use one for free and the third option is just use MongoDB server, which is an MPM packaged. And yeah, this is a MPM packaged that you can use that will, basically, spin up in in-memory MongoDB server for you to use, if you don't want to download it but I highly recommend downloading it instead.
[00:01:34] So once you have all that you should be good to go, so I'm just gonna go ahead and kick it off, jump into some of these slides. The link to the slides are gonna be in the Read Me of the repo, so if you scroll down you'll see a resources section and right there there are slides.
[00:01:47] You can click on that and that'll take you to the slides or you can just follow along with me.
>> Scott Moss: So like I said, this is gonna be an introduction to GraphQL. GraphQL is very complex and the reason it is is because it makes things simple for you.
[00:02:02] So I can talk about GraphQL for a month, and I'm learning new stuff every day, so this is gonna be an introduction, and it'll give you just enough for you to create your own APIs and work with other existing GraphQL APIs.
>> Scott Moss: Okay, so intro to some of the tools.
[00:02:18] So some of the familiar tools that we're gonna be using like I said, we're gonna be using the Node.js for the run times. So that's we're gonna actually create an APIs in node, which is a JavaScript. MongoDB for our database, you could use any database for GraphQL, it doesn't have to be a graph database, it could be whatever database you want, it doesn't even have to be a database.
[00:02:35] You can use GraphQL for retrieving data for anything, I mean you use GraphQL to write CSS queries if you want it doesn't have to be a database. We're gonna use Mongoose for interacting with our database and then we're gonna be using Jest for testing everything. So those are some of the familiar tools that having nothing to do with GraphQL that we'll be using in this course.