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

, it also can be composed with other services using

Apollo Federation

(so for example you can handle the mutations in a different service).

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!