Deploying Serverless Node Apollo Graphql on Vercel: A Guide

In this guide, we'll be walking through the process of deploying a Serverless Node Apollo GraphQL application on Vercel. If you're not already familiar with these technologies, don't worry - we'll start with the basics and work our way up. By the end of this guide, you'll have a fully functional GraphQL API up and running on Vercel!

What is Serverless Node Apollo GraphQL?

Before we dive into the deployment process, let's take a quick moment to define some of the key terms in our title. First up is Serverless - this is a term that refers to a cloud computing execution model where the cloud provider dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources. In other words, instead of provisioning and managing your own servers, you can use a serverless architecture to automatically scale your application up and down based on demand.

Next is Node - this is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine. It allows you to run JavaScript on the server side, which is a key component of our Serverless Node Apollo GraphQL application.

Finally, we have Apollo GraphQL - this is a popular open-source framework for building GraphQL APIs. GraphQL is a query language for APIs that allows clients to define the structure of the data they need, and servers to return exactly that data. Apollo provides a set of tools and libraries for building GraphQL APIs that are scalable, flexible, and easy to use.

Prerequisites

Before we begin, there are a few prerequisites you'll need to have in place. First, you'll need a Vercel account - you can sign up for free on their website. Next, you'll need Node.js and npm installed on your local machine. You can download Node.js from the official website, and npm is included in the installation.

Once you have those prerequisites in place, you'll need to install the Vercel CLI. You can do this by running the following command in your terminal:

npm install -g vercel

Creating a New Node Apollo GraphQL Application

Now that we have everything we need installed, let's create a new Node Apollo GraphQL application. We'll be using the Apollo Server library to create our API, so we'll need to install that first:

npm init apollo

This command will create a new Apollo Server project with a basic schema and resolvers. You can open up the project in your text editor and take a look at the code. You should see a file called schema.graphql that contains the schema for our API, and a file called resolvers.js that contains the resolvers for our API.

Deploying to Vercel

Now that we have our Node Apollo GraphQL application up and running locally, let's deploy it to Vercel. First, we'll need to create a new Vercel project:

vercel create

This command will prompt you to enter a name for your project, and then it will create a new Vercel project with that name. Once the project is created, we can deploy our Node Apollo GraphQL application to it.

To do this, we'll need to add a few things to our project. First, we'll need to install the Vercel serverless function package:

npm install --save vercel

Next, we'll need to create a new file called vercel.json in the root of our project. This file will tell Vercel how to deploy our application. Here's an example vercel.json file for a Node Apollo GraphQL application:

{
  "version": 2,
  "builds": [
    { "src": "package.json", "use": "@vercel/node" }
  ],
  "routes": [
    { "src": "/api/(.*)", "dest": "index.js" }
  ]
}

This vercel.json file tells Vercel to build our application using the package.json file, and to deploy our API to the /api path. Now we're ready to deploy our application to Vercel.

To do this, we'll run the following command in our terminal:

vercel

This command will prompt us to select the Vercel project we want to deploy to. Once we've selected our project, Vercel will automatically build and deploy our application. Once the deployment is complete, we can access our Node Apollo GraphQL API at the URL provided by Vercel.

In this guide, we've covered the basics of deploying a Serverless Node Apollo GraphQL application on Vercel. We've walked through the process of creating a new Node Apollo GraphQL application, and we've covered the steps necessary to deploy it to Vercel. With these steps in place, you should be able to create and deploy your own Node Apollo GraphQL applications on Vercel.

References