GraphQL, Node.JS and React Monorepo Starter Kit

Following the GraphQL Apollo Starter Kit (Lerna, Node.js), I wanted to dig deeper into developing a monorepo for a GraphQL/React client-server application.

Unfortunately, things are not as easy as I thought at first. Chiefly the create-react-app template does not appear to work very well with monorepos and local dependencies to other packages.

That's why I put together a small, simple starter template for developing modular client-server applications using React, GraphQL and Node.js. Here is the code on GitHub:

nodejs-react-monorepo-starter-kit

Some things to note:

• There are four packages in the project
  • client-main: The React client, based on create-react-app
  • client-components: Contains a definition of the component app. Used by client-main
  • server-main: The Node.js server definition
  • server-books: Contains schema and resolver for GraphQL backend. Used by server-main.
• Each package defines it's own package.json and can be built independent of the other packages.
• The main entry point for the dependent packages (client-components and server-books) is set to dist/index.js. This way, packages which use them, can use the transpiled version created by babel and don't need to worry about specific JS features used in the dependent packages.

Like GraphQL Apollo Starter Kit (Lerna, Node.js) this starter kit is meant to be very basic to allow easy exploration of the source code.