Building a basic GraphQL Server with Node

Introduction

So, you know how GraphQL works, you understand how to structure a schema, and you can write basic queries and mutations. But, how do you get a basic GraphQL server running on your own?

This is a topic that a lot of people struggle with, and the process can seem fairly opaque. In reality, it is very easy!

In this section, we will walk through setting up our own basic GraphQL server and discuss the various options available to us.

Setting up a GraphQL server

By far the easiest way to set up a GraphQL server is to use Express. This is a battle-tested web framework, and it has a great deal of support and packages available online.

To get started, let’s create a new Express application along with the express-graphql library:

mkdir graphql-server &&

cd graphql-server &&

npm install express express-graphql graphql --save

When this has completed, create a server.js file and add the following:

import express from 'express';
import { graphqlHTTP } from 'express-graphql';
import { buildSchema } from 'graphql';

// Construct a schema, using GraphQL schema language
const schema = buildSchema(`
  type Query {
    hello: String
 

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