Building a music app Part 3: Creating the Back-end with Prisma, Express & Nexus

To build the back-end of the music app, I needed to work with a database, and I also needed to set up a server.

In my case, I decided to use Prisma, an ORM that makes working with databases really simple, as well as Express.

Setting up Prisma

Using Prisma makes working with databases very simple. I used this ORM to quickly set up a SQLite database with few command using the CLI.

Once we initialize Prisma using the npx prisma init command, we get a new blank schema.prisma file with few instructions on how to plan our database schema.

More on Prisma here.

Setting up Express

To Set up Express, I installed it using npm, then I created a GraphQL endpoint in the main server.ts file. Because I am GraphQL, which uses a single endpoint, I didn't need to create new routes and endpoints.

Building the GraphQL schema with Nexus

GraphQL schema is where we define our Object Types (Queries and mutations) and resolvers.

Nexus automatically generates a schema while providing additional benefits like type safety.

Testing the API

To test the API, Express  provides us with a very useful playground interface  to test our queries and mutations, to access the playground simple go to the endpoint URL http://localhost:4000/api/graphql

Get the code

The full source code of the Express server is available here.