Using The Combination of Laravel GraphQL: How to Do it Right?

The learning curve for Laravel is significantly less steep when compared to other web and application development platforms.

As a favorite among the developer community, Laravel has swiftly gained popularity due to its ease of use and vast library of files that is constantly being updated.

Using a framework can help software developers reduce the amount of time spent developing online systems that must be dynamic and that must meet agreed-upon dates for project delivery. PHP can take a month to complete, but with Laravel, you could complete it in half the time.

If you want to build a simple application with Laravel, you don’t have to devote several hours of your day to watching lengthy courses or tutorials before you can get started.The official Laravel documentation is available on the company’s website.It’s jam-packed with useful information, all of which is laid out in an approachable format.

Laravel GraphQL

It is important to note that, if you are not already familiar with it, GraphQL is a query language that laravel developers use to connect with its API, and it has several advantages over alternative designs such as REST.

GraphQL makes it easy to do a single request on a variety of linked data sources, even nested ones. This enables developers to obtain all of the data they require from the server in a single round trip. When utilized as an endpoint for mobile and single-page applications, GraphQL has the potential to be incredibly useful and efficient.

While Laravel includes a variety of pre-built tools to assist developers in getting their applications up and running quickly, developers can also choose to use their own implementations in place of Laravel’s pre-built interfaces if they so desire.

For Laravel developers, we prefer Laravel over Symfony, however this is a personal preference.

Symfony is a free and open-source PHP web framework based on Symfony, whereas Laravel is a PHP web framework based on Laravel. Both frameworks have a set of reusable PHP libraries and components. To sum it up, both frameworks let developers work more quickly and effectively.

However, here is why in the fight between Symfony vs Laravel, Laravel wins most of the times:

• Learning to utilize one or the other might be critical for any professional embarking on a new project, and in these situations, Laravel is preferable to Symfony because the latter demands more effort in specific areas in order to get more out of the framework than Laravel.
• According to Google data, Laravel is generating greater attention among developers.

Despite the fact that the communities surrounding GraphQL and Laravel have developed significantly since they were made open source, documentation on how to use these two technologies together is still rather lacking in this area.

To demonstrate how to establish your own GraphQL server using Laravel, we will walk you through the process in this article.

Project resources

Articles and Users will be the two types of resources that will be included in our program.

In our GraphQL schema, a number of these resources will be represented as object types, including:

The schema shows us that our two items have a one-to-many relationship. Users can write a large number of articles, and each article has a specific author (user).

So, having specified the objects that will be used to create and query our data, let’s construct the query and mutation objects that will be used to do these operations:

Configuration of the Laravel project

Next, we can build up and execute our Laravel project in PHP, following the declaration of GraphQL’s schema. Let’s begin by creating a new Laravel application with the Composer project as our starting point.

$ composer create-project –prefer-dist laravel/laravel laravel-graphql

To get started, let’s establish our article model and the migration file that will be used to create the corresponding table:

$ php artisan make:model Article -m

Let’s make some modifications to the migration file that was generated:

A foreign key has been added to our users table, referencing the id column and the title and content fields from our GraphQL schema.

Now that we’ve defined our migration files, let’s put them into action on our database:

$ php artisan migrate

Then we may update our models by defining the relationships that are required:

Database Seeding

$ php artisan make:seeder UsersTableSeeder

$ php artisan make:seeder ArticlesTableSeeder

Next, we’ll set them up to put some bogus data into our SQLite database, as shown below:

Finally, let’s go ahead and run our database seeders in order to populate our database with some information:

$ php artisan db:seed

In conclusion,  GraphQL APIs are broken down into three categories: Queries, Types, and Mutations.

• Mutations are in charge of keeping track of your CRUD activities.
• In order to get information from a database, queries are needed.
• When the client requests a model resource, the type is the resource that is returned.