Overview

Let's get our local development environment ready to work with connectors.

In this lesson, we will:

• Verify our Apollo account
• Install the Rover CLI
• Set up our local environment
• Create a graph in GraphOS Studio
• Run rover dev

What we're building

Airlock is an intergalactic travel booking app: a resource we can use to find a cool place to stay in the wide open universe!

Eventually, Airlock will be a full-fledged supergraph with many different subgraphs. For now, we'll start with the listings subgraph, powered by the Listings REST API.

1) Verify your Apollo account

To get started with connectors, you'll need an Apollo account with one of the following plans: GraphOS Trial or Enterprise.

Don't have an account yet? Create one now. You'll automatically be enrolled in a GraphOS Trial plan with the correct role. You can move on to the next step to install the Rover CLI.

If you already have an account, check your organization's current plan in GraphOS Studio. From your organization's page, go to the Settings tab and select Billing. You will need to have a GraphOS Trial or Enterprise plan. Additionally, you will also need to have the Graph Admin role in that organization to be able to create graphs.

2) Install the Rover CLI

Rover is Apollo's command line interface (CLI) tool that helps developers work with graphs and interact with GraphOS. We'll use it to spin up a local supergraph we can work with locally.

We'll be using a specific version of Rover (that's currently in preview) that works with the Apollo VS Code extension (which we'll install at a later step).

1. Open up a terminal and run the install command that suits your computer's environment:

   For Linux / Mac OS:

   curl -sSL https://rover.apollo.dev/nix/v0.27.0-preview.0 | sh

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   For Windows PowerShell installer

   iwr 'https://rover.apollo.dev/win/v0.27.0-preview.0' | iex

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   Note: You can find other installation methods in the Apollo documentation. You'll need to download this version: v0.27.0-preview.0.

2. If you've already installed Rover before, you'll get a message asking if you'd like to overwrite the existing installation. Type y and hit enter to continue.

3. Verify that the installation completed successfully:

   rover --version

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4. You should see the following output:

   Rover 0.27.0-preview.0

3) Set up your local environment

3a) Clone the project repo

In a terminal window, run the following:

Your project directory will look something like this:

In listings.graphql, we're starting off with a small GraphQL schema.

We'll build onto this throughout the course!

3b) Install the Apollo VS Code Extension

We strongly recommend using VS Code to make use of our Apollo VS Code extension. It brings many helpful features for working on a GraphQL project, such as intelligent autocomplete, schema information, syntax highlighting and much more!

Install the Apollo VS Code extension.

4) Create a new connectors supergraph in GraphOS Studio

1. In Studio, if you have a brand new organization, you'll see two choices to start. Select "Connect a REST API".

   studio.apollographql.com

   

   If you already have existing graphs, click the arrow beside "+ Create New Graph", then select Create a new connectors supergraph.

   studio.apollographql.com

   

2. Give your graph a name.

   studio.apollographql.com

   

3. Keep the example subgraph as users and graph as visible to others. Then hit "Create graph".

4. The next step in the process outlines how to set up our local development environment using an example users subgraph. It's great for getting started quickly, but we've already got our Airlock API to work on, so we won't do all the steps in this process!

   studio.apollographql.com

   

5. We've already got step 1 completed with our special Rover installation. We're also starting with a supergraph.yaml file in our project repo, and a schema, so that's steps 2 and 3 done!

6. Scrolling down to step 4, let's copy and paste over the values for APOLLO_KEY and APOLLO_GRAPH_REF into our rover-dev.md file.

   studio.apollographql.com

   

5) Run rover dev

rover dev spins up a supergraph in your local environment.

In a new terminal window, run the command in the rover-dev.md file that suits your local environment. Don't forget, we substituted over our own values for APOLLO_KEY and APOLLO_GRAPH_REF in the previous step!

You should see output messages in the terminal that the router has started up at port 4000.

We're ready!

Open up http://localhost:4000 in the browser to see a Sandbox Explorer running, ready to create and run operations.

Key takeaways

• To get started with Apollo Connectors, you need an Apollo account with a GraphOS Trial or Enterprise plan.
• To run a local supergraph, you'll need rover dev and your graph identifiers.

Up next

If we try to run queries against our schema now, we'll get errors! Let's jump into the schema and link to our REST API with @source!