apollo-flash

Apollo Flash

A smart and efficient toolkit to quickly bootstrap an apollo-server project.

It comes with the following tools:

• TypeDefs Schema and Resolvers auto-loader. Remove complexity of schema / resolvers objects management.
• http-only cookie based authentication with JWT. Strong stateless authentication that allows horizontal scaling and maximum security.
• graphql-auth. Resolver's middleware function that enable app security checking. Flash also provide context generator accordingly.

Installation and dependencies

If you wish to use cookie based auth : you'll need some kind of tool that add a cookie property to the request object (cookie-parser is fine with express). because apollo-flash will look for a jwt in the cookie object first.

If you choose to not use cookie implementation, while it is recommanded, apollo-flash will only look for Authorization: Bearer <token> header.

In all cases apollo-flash will first try to look for a jwt cookie before looking for the authorizarion header.

That's why we suggest to use apollo-server-express (or koa equivalent).

Then you just need to:

npm install apollo-flash --save

Core concepts

Apollo Flash will automatically load your types definitions and resolvers by parsing your project directories. It is also shipped with a authentication middleware that add user in the app context.

Learn How to use the authication middleware

import ApolloFlash from "apollo-flash";
// ... Some imports of model, etc

// ... Some database instantation

// We need the user model to provide getUserFromId
const userModel = new UserModel(DB)

const Flash = new ApolloFlash({
  getScopeFromUser: user => Promise.resolve([]), // An array of string.
  getUserFromId: userModel.findById.bind(this), // Do not forget to bind or wrap in order to maintain scope.
  jwtSigningKey: "yoursigningstring", // Or file Buffer with public key.
  resolversFolderPath: path.resolve(__dirname, "resolvers"),
  typeDefsFolderPath: path.resolve(__dirname, "schemas")
});

const server = new ApolloServer({
  context: async (serverContext) => ({
    ...await flash.buildContext(serverContext),
    CourseModel: new CourseModel(DB),
    Usermodel: userModel,
  }),
  resolvers: Flash.generateRootResolver(),
  typeDefs: Flash.generateTypeDefs()
});

Schema auto-loader

Tired of taking care that each type is correctly loaded before being able to use it in your schema definition ? Don't worry this is over.

All you need to do is create a directory which contain files that export an array of string representing your scheme.

// <project_root>/schemas/user/index.js`
const UserSchema = `
  "An user of the application"
  type User {
    _id: ID!
    lastname: String!
    firstname: String!
    email: String!
    preferences; UserPreferences
  }
`;

const UserPreferencesSchema = `
  type UserPreferences {
    displayStartHint: Boolean
  }
`;

export default [UserSchema, UserPreferencesSchema];

Schema types dependencies are auto-solved due to automated flattening imports using Flash.generateTypeDefs(). Folder structure is up to you and have no impact.

Resolver auto-loader

Resolvers are loaded the same way, except that file naming count.

Let's start by creating a folder named resolvers.

Inside this folder, create a file named Query.js and here is an example of content inside this file (You might use an object too, I'm using a class that is auto-instantiated while exporting, this is just a matter of preferences).

apollo-flash only search resolver for one level depth in the given folder, if you are using nested folder for destructuring, please use it as import in your resolvers.

// resolvers/Query.js
class Query {
  me = (root, values, context) => {
    return context.auth.user || { _id: "", email: "", friends: [] };
  };

  getPlaces = async (root, values, context) => {
    return await context.PlaceModel.findAll();
  };
}

export default new Query();

Well. We just instantiated the root Query resolver.

Now me property is returning an array of string in the friends key which are user instance. We are going to transform this to real users instances.

// resolvers/User.js
class User {
  friends = async (parent, values, context) => {
    if (!parent.friends) {
      return null;
    }

    // Trigger calls in parallel then wait for all results.
    return await Promise.all(
      parent.friends.map(userId => context.UserModel.findById(userId))
    );
  };
}

See, combining class is simple as that.