Learning GraphQL

Chapter 6. GraphQL Clients

With your GraphQL server built, it’s now time to set up GraphQL on the client side. Very broadly, a client is just an application that communicates with a server. Because of the flexibility of GraphQL, there’s no prescription for how to build a client. You might be building apps for web browsers. You might be creating native applications for phones. You might be building a GraphQL service for a screen on your refrigerator. It also does not matter to the client in which language the service is written.

All you really need to send queries and mutations is the ability to send an HTTP request. When the service responds with some data, you can use it in your client no matter what that client is.

Using a GraphQL API

The easiest way to begin is just to make an HTTP request to your GraphQL endpoint. To test the server that we built in Chapter 5, make sure your service is running locally at http://localhost:4000/graphql. You can also find all of these samples running on CodeSandbox at the links found in the Chapter 6 repository.

fetch Requests

As you saw in Chapter 3, you can send requests to a GraphQL service by using cURL. All you need is a few different values:

• A query: {totalPhotos, totalUsers}

• A GraphQL endpoint: http://localhost:4000/graphql

• A content type: Content-Type: application/json

From there, you send the cURL request directly from the terminal/command prompt using the POST method:

curl -X POST \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ --data ...