With our database code in place, we are now ready to turn our attention to writing our GraphQL server. One of the earliest decisions I took when writing the sample code for this chapter was that we would simplify the process of writing our code as much as possible. If we look at a reference sample that Facebook posted, we will find that the code can be tediously long-winded:

import {
  graphql,
  GraphQLSchema,
  GraphQLObjectType,
  GraphQLString
} from 'graphql';

var schema = new GraphQLSchema({
  query: new GraphQLObjectType({
    name: 'RootQueryType',
    fields: {
      hello: {
        type: GraphQLString,
        resolve() {
          return 'world';
        }
      }
    }
  })
});

This example is from https://github.com/graphql/graphql-js. We can see that we have a lot of reliance on special types that don't map one to one onto TypeScript types.

Since we want to make our code that bit more TypeScript-friendly, we are going to use type-graphql. We will install it via npm, along with the graphql type definitions and reflect-metadata:

npm install type-graphql @types/graphql reflect-metadata --save

At this stage, we should also set our tsconfig file up to look like this:

{
  "compileOnSave": false,
  "compilerOptions": {
    "target": "es2016", 
    "module": "commonjs",
    "lib": ["es2016", "esnext.asynciterable", "dom"],
    "outDir": "./dist",
    "noImplicitAny": true,
    "esModuleInterop": true,
    "experimentalDecorators": true,
    "emitDecoratorMetadata": true,
  }
}