4. Deploying Apollo Server
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🚀 Deploying our server

Let's get our up and running in production using Railway!

Railway is a cloud service platform that enables us to deploy our app without having to worry about the infrastructure specifics. This course uses Railway because it can sync to a GitHub repository and it has a free tier that lets us run our app without a credit card!

We can get started with Railway by clicking Login on the homepage. You can choose to login with your email, or with your GitHub account directly. We'll authenticate with our GitHub account and save ourselves some additional steps.

You might also need to complete verification steps for Railway to get access to your account.

From the dashboard, let's click New Project.

Railway dashboard with the New Project button highlighted on the top right

Then select Deploy from GitHub repo.

Next, we'll select Configure GitHub App, then step through the instructions on GitHub to authorize Railway. Now we can access our repositories!

Railway dashboard showing GitHub repositories

Let's select the repo that we forked. But before deploying, we need to set a few environment variables.

🌲 Adding the environment variables

Let's click Add variables.

Railway project with Add Variables button highlighted

We'll take care of these all at once by using the Raw Editor.

Railway project with Raw Editor button text highlighted

This opens a modal where we can paste in all of our handy .

Railway project with Raw Editor modal open

Remember the environment variables Studio gave us when we created our ? Let's put those to use!

Back in Studio, we'll copy all three of our 's . Make sure you toggle the eye icon for the APOLLO_KEY before copying it - we want the real value, after all!

Let's hop back over to Railway and paste those in the ENV panel. Then, click Update Variables.

Now if we jump over to the Deployments tab, we'll see that Railway triggered a new deployment of our app. And after just a few moments, we should see it worked!

Next, we want to our server at a public URL on the internet. To do this, we'll need to generate a domain. Go to your app's Settings tab, and click the Generate Domain button under the Domains header.

Railway project, under Settings tab, click Generate Domain

This will automatically create a production URL that we'll use in our client app later on.

Let's click on the generated URL and… uh-oh!

Production URL with PORT error

We need to make one change to our code. Railway needs our server to run on a port specified by the PORT environment variable, which is set behind the scenes.

🔌 Setting the PORT

Let's open up our server repo. In the src folder, open up the index.js file.

Right now, by default, is listening on port 4000. We need to update this by specifying an options object in the listen method.

await server.listen({ port: process.env.PORT || 4000 });

The port property should be set to process.env.PORT (with PORT in all-caps). To make sure our server still works locally on our own machines however, we'll add an "or" (||) and specify 4000 as our port number.

And that's it! Let's make sure to add and commit these changes, and push it up to our GitHub repo.

Task!
Code Challenge!

Edit the code below to configure Apollo Server to listen to a port specified by process.env.PORT, or if that doesn't exist, a hard-coded port number 4000.

Back in Railway, we should see the new commit trigger another deploy.

Let's try this again. Go back to that generated URL and... we see the landing page for in production! Yay! 🎉

Apollo Server landing page in production

But this page looks a bit different from what we would normally see if we had run our server locally.

We don't have the option to our server through . This is because Railway automatically set the NODE_ENV environment variable to production, which alerts our to switch itself to production as well, automatically disabling .

🤔 What is GraphQL introspection?

is a feature that enables us to a for information about the underlying schema. This includes data like types, , and field-level descriptions. Tools like use introspection to build and run queries.

Illustration of introspection in development environments

The problem is that having in production can be a major security issue. It exposes all of our 's structure and what we can do with it to the whole world. In most cases, that's not what we want! This is why disables by default in a production environment.

Illustration of introspection in production environments, where introspection is turned off
What information can we query from a GraphQL server through the introspection feature?
Which of these statements are true about the introspection feature?

How do we test our server if we can't it with tools that rely on ? Well, thanks to the schema registry, we now have a secure way to access our and run queries on it using Apollo Explorer.

Querying with Explorer

Let's navigate to the Explorer and test out the tracksForHome .

query GetTracks {
  tracksForHome {
    id
    title
    thumbnail
    length
    modulesCount
    author {
      name
      photo
    }
  }
}

The first time you try to run the , the Explorer will prompt you for the URL of your production server. This is the domain URL we generated in Railway.

http://studio.apollographql.com
Apollo Studio Connection Settings in Explorer

See, our tracksForHome still works!

Task!

Amazing, our server is live in production! 🎉 Next, let's tackle the client app.

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