accounts VS apollo-server

Right now we implemented a simple REST-based Passport authentication, but we already have PRs for Accounts-JS based authentication which will use the GraphQL endpoint instead of traditional REST ones. An additional chapter about Pagination is also expected, as well as a “Performance” chapter tackling the N+1 problem with GraphQL. Our backend has been designed to handle way more features than the ones currently implemented, so be ready because features like the Whatsapp blue ticks are going to land on our clone very soon.

We are working with the creators of the js-accounts libraries to create a GraphQL Modules module out of their awesome packages so you could just add it from npm and extend your server and schema.

Internally, we use GraphQL-Modules and AccountsJS to help us with those two decisions, GraphQL-Modules helps us solve our architectural problems in modular, schema-first approaches with the power of GraphQL and AccountsJS helps us create our authentication solutions by providing a simple API together with client and server libraries that saves us a lot of the ground work around authentication.

Another interesting point is that executing fetches on the server can allow developers to more easily leverage caching. Next.js already handles caching out-of-the-box and I’m curious to see if the wider adoption of RSC reduces the need to combine React with solutions like Apollo Server and Apollo Client. While there are other benefits to these tools, RSC could provide similar caching behavior without the need to invest in a GraphQL solution.

There are several GraphQL server implementations, however, for this tutorial, we'll utilize Apollo GraphQL's Apollo Server, a lightweight and flexible JavaScript server that makes it easy to build GraphQL APIs.

As I mentioned, their main GraphQL server package is[1], so that's where the confusion came from. Thanks.

[1] https://github.com/apollographql/apollo-server/blob/9817bc47...

While working on this blog post, I learned that Apollo Server, the most popular GraphQL server for typescript, uses a similar method for adding error codes to GraphQL. It even lets you add custom errors. Hopefully, someday other GraphQL server projects will follow them. Until then, we’ve got a strong indication we took the right approach.

GraphQL is just a schema, there are many different implementations of a GraphQL server, AppSync being one of them. I mentioned Apollo server in this series as well.

After some head-scratching, I opened an issue on Apollo Server’s GitHub repository. There, Apollo Server contributor @​glasser shared a helpful suggestion: why not invoke our AuthPlugin from Apollo Server’s context function? Throwing from context would ensure we can control the HTTP status response without having to introduce more methods and error checks to our AuthPlugin (like unexpectedErrorProcessingRequest). With that suggestion in mind, we rewrote our AuthPlugin as follows:

Apollo as a middleware in Express.js, actually.

Apollo Server 3 Cookie Issue #5775

Lastly, instead of writing our API core ourselves, we'll be using the star of this episode --- Apollo Server (a.k.a. GraphQL server). It has detailed documentation available here.