Next GraphQL Apollo Starter

A starter to bootstrap your Next application (nice pun gg) with some noice GraphQL (🎊 With SSR support 🎊) with Apollo and GraphQL code generator

Usage

$ yarn
# install dependencies

$ yarn dev
# launch concurrently gql-gen:watch and dev:next

$ yarn gql-gen
# launch GraphQL code generation based on codegen.yaml

$ yarn gql-gen:watch
# same as above, with watch mode

$ yarn dev:next
# launch Next dev script

$ yarn build
# launch Next build script

$ yarn start
# launch Next start script

$ yarn test
# launch test suite

$ yarn cy:open
# open cypress (you first need to install deps in cypress folder)

$ yarn ts:check
# check TypeScript

$ yarn lint
# run ESLint

GraphQL support

The starter comes by default with Apollo@3. All Apollo related code and config is located under ~/apollo folder.
It uses environment variables to define the API endpoint, so you have to copy/paste the .env.sample file and rename it to .env (not committed). The variable name is NEXT_PUBLIC_GRAPHQL_API

To make the codegen work, you must have a schema.graphql at the root (can be modified in the codegen.yaml, see the configuration reference). Based on this and your *.graphql files in ~/graphql/**, it will auto generate corresponding hooks.

When writing *.graphql files, you can also import other *.graphql files by using comments, but this is no longer necessary because last versions of graphql codegen inline *.graphql docs.

~/graphql/fragments/ProjectCard_project.graphql

fragment ProjectCard_project on Project {
  title
  body
}

~/graphql/queries/Projects.graphql

query Projects {
  projects {
    id
    ...ProjectCard_project
  }
}

Using Apollo in server side

If you want to fetch your data with Apollo from your server, you must use the provided functions initializeApollo and addApolloState. They are used to get apollo either from an already initialized client or a new one. They are also responsible for populating the Apollo store and restore it on the client side.

Here is an example on how to use it

import { gql } from '@apollo/client'
import type { GetServerSideProps, NextPage } from 'next'
import { useHelloQuery } from '~/__generated__/graphql'
import { addApolloState, initializeApollo } from '~/apollo/client'
const Page: NextPage = () => {
   data will already be available on first render
  // be
  se it has been fetched on your server side and been 
  // po
  ated into the apollo cache store.
  const
  const { data } = useHelloQuery()
  return <div>{data.hello}</div>
}
export const getServerSideProps: GetServerSideProps = async ctx => {
  const client = initializeApollo()
  const { data } = await client.query({
    query: gql`
      query Hello {
        hello
      }
    `,
  })
  if (!data.hello) {
    return { notFound: true }
  }
  return addApolloState(client, { props: {} })
}

You can also use the provided hook useApollo to get your apollo client instance with the correct store cache if you made a query on your server side.

Configuration

All configuration related files are located in the codegen.yaml file (more informations here) A .graphqlconfig file is also provided, if you use a GraphQL extension in your IDE, it will allow you to introspect the schema of a given endpoint and writing it in a schema.graphql file. You must enter your API url here

Examples

Example usage for a given query

query Projects {
  projects {
    id
    title
    body
  }
}

which generate a hook and a component and could be used like this :

import React, { FC } from 'react'
import { useProjectsQuery } from '~/__generated__/graphql'
 file is generated by gql-codegen

const
const Projects: FC = () => {
  const { data, loading, error } = useHelloQuery()
  if (error) {
    return <div>Error</div>
  }
  if (loading) {
    return <div>Loading...</div>
  }
  if (data.projects) {
      }
  }
  return null
}
const App: FC = () => {
  return (
    <div className="App">
      <main>
        <Projects />
      </main>
    </div>
  )
}
export default App

and you get all the nice autocompletion from your IDE thanks to Typescript! And if you change any of *.graphql files to add a new field for a GraphQL query, it will be automatically generated and you will be always in sync with your GraphQL files!

Next config

It comes already configured with some nice plugin. You can see in next.config.js what is used. In short, it allows support of importing images files and fonts within webpack. It also comes with NProgress support, by default so it shows a small loading bar in top of the page when loading. You can find the component in ~/components/NProgress.tsx, and it is used in the custom _app.tsx

Styled component

The template comes with styled-components. Again, you can either choose to not use it, this is a personal choice. You can also find a styles folder, which contains many related styled-components files to keep things organized. It's also includes all themes-related stuff in here. It's again a personal convention that I follow, feel free to annihilate this directory if you want 😢

Styled system

It also comes with styled-system. It is a great way to build reusable UI blocks with a great props API and consistent spaces / typography. A lot comes from the theme, provided in ~/styles/themes/base.ts where we define some breakpoints, spacings and typography stuff. It allows then the custom AppBox component (~/ui/AppBox) to be aware of your theme and then build something amazing with the primitives. By default, this starter provides some basic examples components that uses this pattern, for example the AppNav component (~/components/layout/AppNav).

🔥 It also supports and provides autocomplete for props that takes source from the theme (e.g bg, zIndex, border...). 🔥

TypeScript > 4.1 is mandatory because I'm using the new Template Litteral Types to provide autocompletion of the color prop based of the nested colors object, so when using bg prop for exemple, you should have autocompletion for red.xxx, blue.xxx or anything defined in your colors.ts. It supports nested elements with a dot notation! (that's why TS 4.1 is required)

Framer motion

Again, personal preference here, but the starter comes with framer motion already configured to handle Next pages changes and enable some smooth transitions when navigating. You can find the default variant used for the page transitions in ~/common/framer.ts.

Testing

Jest and @testing-library/react is used to run your tests. It comes preconfigured with ts-jest so your tests also checks your types. You can look the jest.config.js and the file setupTest.ts to see what's in there. jest-styled-components is also used to have deterministic classNames within your styled components that you are testing. Cypress starter for e2e tests. Take a look at Cypress config file cypress.json

Cypress

This starter comes by default with Cypress and some sensible defaults and a custom plugin which enable you to inject your .env* files in the Cypress.env helper. It also add support for a per-environment configuration file. Just add a cypress..json. It uses by default the cypress.json and then extend the configuration if you have a cypress.<env>.json. Take a look at the various configuration file in the cypress folder and the custom plugin in cypress/plugins/index.ts. This folder is independant and lives by itself, so it has his own dependencies / scripts / tsconfig and do not pollute the global namespace. See why an isolated folder

It also have an opiniated way of interacting with some of your webpages in Cypress. As your application will grow (and pages would become complex), it's recommended to have some sort of "Page objects" which allows you to work in a more conveniant way for some complex page. See more here https://basarat.gitbook.io/typescript/intro-1/cypress#tip-creating-page-objects.

It also comes with two custom commands (cypress/support/commands.ts) that are autocompleted (see cypress/@types/index.d.ts)

cy.server() // start mocking the calls made to the server, needed to mock later the queries
cy.mockGraphQL() // in your test, allow to start intercepting requests made to your /graphql/ endpoint
cy.mockGraphQLOperation('ViewerQuery') // internally alias the request, so you can do later in your test cy.wait
// your test ...
cy.wait('@ViewerQuery') // waits for the graphql operation to succeed

Aliases

It includes by default support for aliases in tsconfig.json. They are 1 defaulted alias, ready to use :

// ~ refers to src folder
import { something } from '~/file'

You can also use for your convenience the global __DEV__ variable, which is injected by webpack with the DefinePlugin (see next.config.js).

@types and extending modules

It also includes a @types directory under src, so you can easily separate your types or extends some external modules. They are also included in the tsconfig.json For example, if some package named foo does not have any types in DefinitelyTyped, you could add a index.d.ts under src/@types/foo/index.d.ts. It is just my personal convention, so do as you want!

// src/@types/foo/index.d.ts


// to make sure Typescript get the original types from the module (if any
import * as foo from 'foo'

declare module 'foo' {
  declare function foo(bar: string): boolean
}

Because the @types directory is declared in typeRoots, Typescript will no longer complain if you imported your package with missing types

Tooling

The template includes Prettier, ESLint (with Typescript-eslint), Babel and lint-staged. All their related configurations are in the *rc files (except for lint-staged, which is located in the package.json).