with-neo4j

StepZen Example: with-neo4j

Introduction

This project builds a GraphQL API connected to Neo4j using StepZen. Neo4j is a graphq database build for develooers, read the complete blog post for this project here.

Getting Started

You'll need to create a StepZen account first. Once you've got that set up, git clone this repository onto your machine and open the working directory:

git clone https://github.com/stepzen-dev/examples.git
cd examples/with-neo4j

Before you can run this example, you need to have a Neo4j instance. Which you can set up in the next section.

Set up Neo4j

1. Go to https://sandbox.neo4j.com/ and sign up for a new account or sign in to your existing account
2. You will be taken to the sandbox dashboard after creating your account. Click on the "Movies" dataset to set up a new project from here.
3. Once you have selected the "movies" dataset, click on the "Create" button. This will create a new Neo4j graph database based on the movie dataset.

After these steps, we will have a Neo4j sandbox environment with a pre-populated movies database. We can now start building our GraphQL API using the Neo4j GraphQL Library.

You should paste these credentials in a new file called .env:

NEO4J_CONNECT_URL=
NEO4J_PASSWORD=

Run the Neo4j GraphQL Library

In the project directory, you can run:

npm install
npm start

This will run the Neo4j GraphQL Library based on the pre-generated GraphQL schema based on the contents of the Movies Neo4j graph database. You can also choose to run npm run generate and in this case the Neo4j GraphQL library will introspect the database and generate a GraphQL schema based on the labels and relationships in the database.

The GraphQL API will be available at http://localhost:4000/graphql.

Set up StepZen

Open your terminal and install the StepZen CLI:

npm install -g stepzen

We'll be using StepZen using the Docker image as the Neo4j GraphQL Library is running locally. You can run the following command to start using Docker:

stepzen service start

This command will start the StepZen service in a Docker container and create a local configuration file at ~/.stepzen/stepzen-config.local.yaml.

3. Log in to the StepZen CLI pointing to the local configuration:

stepzen login --config ~/.stepzen/stepzen-config.local.yaml

We can now use StepZen for local development and the CLI like when running StepZen in the cloud.

4. In the directory stepzen, you can run:

stepzen start

This will start the GraphQL API at http://localhost:5000/api/with-neo4j/__graphql. The StepZen GraphQL schema is pointed towards http://host.docker.internal:4000/graphql which is the Neo4j GraphQL Library running locally.

Add the New York Times API

The file sample.config.yaml contains the configuration for the New York Times API. You can copy the contents of this file to stepzen/config.yaml and replace the value for api-key with your own API key.

To get an API Key you need to sign up for a New York Times API key by following the instructions on the developer page. After creating an account, you can create an application and find the API key for the free New York Times API here.

configurationset:
  - configuration:
      name: nyt
      apiKey: ADD_YOUR_API_KEY_HERE

After adding the API key, you can run stepzen service start again and the New York Times API will be available at http://localhost:5000/api/with-neo4j/__graphql.

Try out the GraphQL API

You can now run the following query to get the top 3 movies and their reviews:

{
  movies(options: {limit: 3}) {
    title
    reviews {
        headline
      }
  }
}

Don't forget to set the value for limit to 3, as the NYT REST API only allows a set number of requests per time.

Learn More

You can learn more in the StepZen documentation. Questions? Head over to Discord or GitHub Discussions to ask questions.