The server is responsible for:
- authentication (via Passport)
- serving the GraphQL endpoint (via
PostGraphile, based on database in
@app/db) - server-side rendering (SSR) of the
@app/clientthanks to Next.js
The server does not perform background tasks such as sending emails, that is the responsibility of the job queue, which can be found in @app/worker.
The entry point to the server is src/index.ts. This file sets up an HTTP server and installs our express app (defined in src/app.ts) into it. The express app installs the middleware it needs from the src/middleware/*.ts files.
Commonly-used values are stored into the Express app itself, using Express'
app.set(key, value) API. Unfortunately this API does not allow for type-safe
retrieval, so we encourage the use of custom typed getters to retrieve the
relevant values, for example:
function getHttpServer(app: Express): Server | void { return app.get("httpServer"); }
postgraphile.tags.jsonc is a
smart tags file used
to configure and shape our resulting GraphQL schema. The file is documented
(hence JSONC); we'd like it to be JSON5 eventually (which should be as simple as
renaming the file and having prettier reformat it for us) but VSCode does not
have built-in support for JSON5 currently.
Our GraphQL schema uses a number of plugins for enhancements and customizations; these can be found in src/plugins.
In development we restart the server quite frequently. We don't want the server
to fail to start when the previous one was killed, so we maintain a list of
shutdownActions to cleanly close servers, sockets, files and the like. These
actions are called automatically when the process exits, or is interrupted with
certain signals such as SIGINT from Ctrl-c.