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GRANDstack Starter

npx create-grandstack-app myNewApp

This project is a starter for building a GRANDstack (GraphQL, React, Apollo, Neo4j Database) application. There are two components to the starter, the web frontend application (in React and Angular flavors) and the API app (GraphQL server).

Hands On With The GRANDstack Starter

Hands On With The GRANDstack Starter Video

Quickstart

The easiest way to get started with the GRANDstack Starter is to create a Neo4j Sandbox instance and use the create-grandstack-app command line tool.

1. Create A Neo4j Sandbox Instance

Neo4j Sandbox allows you to create a free hosted Neo4j instance private to you that can be used for development.

After singing in to Neo4j Sandbox, click the + New Project button and select the "Blank Sandbox" option. In the next step we'll use the connection credentials from the "Connection details" tab to connect our GraphQL API to this Neo4j instance.

Neo4j Sandbox connection details

2. Run the create-grandstack-app CLI

npx create-grandstack-app myNewApp

or with Yarn

yarn create grandstack-app myNewApp

create grandstack app output

This will create a new directory myNewApp, download the latest release of the GRANDstack Starter, install dependencies and prompt for your connection credentials for Neo4j to connect to the GraphQL API.

3. Seed the database (optional)

Once the application is running, in another terminal run

npm run seedDb

or with Yarn

yarn run seedDb

4. Open In Browser

Grandstack app running in browser

Overview

The GRANDstack Starter is a monorepo that includes a GraphQL API application and client web applications for React (default) and Angular.

/ - Project Root

The root directory contains some global configuration and scripts:

  • npm run start and npm run build
  • ESLint (.eslintrc.json) for code linting
  • Prettier (.prettierrc.json) for code formatting
  • Git hooks for applying formatting on commit

This directory contains the GraphQL API application using Apollo Server and neo4j-graphql.js.

  • Change environment variable settings in .env:
# Use this file to set environment variables with credentials and configuration options
# This file is provided as an example and should be replaced with your own values
# You probably don't want to check this into version control!

NEO4J_URI=bolt://localhost:7687
NEO4J_USER=neo4j
NEO4J_PASSWORD=letmein

# Uncomment this line to enable encrypted driver connection for Neo4j
#NEO4J_ENCRYPTED=true

# Uncomment this line to specify a specific Neo4j database (v4.x+ only)
#NEO4J_DATABASE=neo4j

GRAPHQL_SERVER_HOST=0.0.0.0
GRAPHQL_SERVER_PORT=4001
GRAPHQL_SERVER_PATH=/graphql

The frontend React web application is found in this directory.

It includes:

  • Material UI
  • React router
  • Apollo Client / React Hooks
  • Create React App

A UI built with Angular, Apollo and the Clarity Design System is also available.

Start the Angular UI server

cd ./web-angular && npm start

See the project releases for the changelog.

Deployment

Netlify

This monorepo can be deployed to Netlify. The frontend application will be served over Netlify's CDN and the GraphQL API will be provisioned as a serverless GraphQL API lambda function deployed to AWS (via Netlify). A netlify.toml file is included with the necessary build configurations. The following environment variables must be set in Netlify (either via the Netlify web UI or via the command line tool)

NEO4J_URI
NEO4J_USER
NEO4J_PASSWORD

See the "Hands On With The GRANDStack Starter" video linked at the beginning of this README for a walkthrough of deploying to Netlify.

Vercel / Zeit Now

Zeit Now v2 can be used with monorepos such as grand-stack-starter. now.json defines the configuration for deploying with Zeit Now v2.

  1. Set the now secrets for your Neo4j instance:
now secret add grand_stack_starter_neo4j_uri bolt://<YOUR_NEO4J_INSTANCE_HERE>
now secret add grand_stack_starter_neo4j_user <YOUR_DATABASE_USERNAME_HERE>
now secret add grand_stack_starter_neo4j_password <YOUR_DATABASE_USER_PASSWORD_HERE>
  1. Run now

Docker Compose

You can quickly start via:

docker-compose up -d

If you want to load the example DB after the services have been started:

docker-compose run api npm run seedDb

You can find instructions for other ways to use Neo4j (Neo4j Desktop, Neo4j Aura, and other cloud services) in the Neo4j directory README.

This project is licensed under the Apache License v2. Copyright (c) 2020 Neo4j, Inc.

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