Instant GraphQL + MongoDB Backend With Mongoke

Implementing a good GraphQL backend to serve your database data is not an easy task, you have to implement a lot of resolvers, add authorization, pagination of the fields and use a DataLoader to not repeat your database queries during relations.

It also becomes boring after some time, especially if you do a lot of side projects with the same stack like me, you have to implement the same basically service for every project.

But i am super lazy and i wanted a reusable, fast way to build my graphql backend, so i built mongoke (https://github.com/remorses/mongoke)

Mongoke is a docker image that generates the GraphQL API to serve your Mongodb data.

It can be used directly from the frontend as it supports authorization via your

jwt

Apollo Federation

Let's create an example, a basic blog app with 2 collections: users and posts

schema: |
    type User {
        _id: ObjectId
        username: String
        email: String
    }
    type BlogPost {
        _id: ObjectId
        author_id: ObjectId
        title: String
        content: String
    }

types:
    User:
        collection: users
    BlogPost:
        collection: posts

relations:
    -   field: posts
        from: User
        to: BlogPost
        relation_type: to_many
        where:
            author_id: ${{ parent['_id'] }}

Here i defined the database schema with the User and BlogPost types, then i defined the associations between the types and the collections and finally i defined a to_many relation from User to BlogPost.

To deploy the above configuration we can use docker-compose

# docker-compose.yml
version: '3'

services:
    mongoke:
        ports:
            - 4000:80
        image: mongoke/mongoke
        environment: 
            DB_URL: mongodb://mongo/db
        volumes: 
            - ./mongoke.yml:/conf.yml  
    mongo:
        image: mongo
        logging: 
            driver: none

The mongoke service generates the boilerplate code every time the service starts, you can go to  http://localhost:4000/graphiql to open graphiql.

An example query you can make:

{
    user(where: {username: {eq: "Mike"}}) {
        _id
        username
        email
        posts {
            nodes {
                title
            }
        }
    }

    blogPosts(first: 10, after: "Post 1", cursorField: title) {
        nodes {
            title
            content
        }
        pageInfo {
            endCursor
            hasNextPage
        }
    }
}

Give me your thoughts in the comments and leave a star on github, thanks for reading!