Learn Apollo, Clojurescript and Docker

While "It works on my computer" might give you an excuse to close a bug ticket in the backlog, it doesn't really work when you're working on a team.

You need to ensure that your application can run regardless of what hardware your teammates are running or libraries they have installed.

Docker solves this problem by collecting everything your application needs to run into a container.

Containers aren't just for source code. They can hold configuration, scripts, and even their own filesystem. It's similar to a Virtual Machine, without having to bring a full operating system along for the ride.

Because containers run in isolation, there is some configuration involved to allow for files to be saved and containers to communicate with one another.

One of the most useful ways to get your head around Docker is to see it in action.

Follow along with Joel Lord as he works through the process of preparing an application to run in separate containers for the frontend and backend of an application that searches for gifs and re-encodes them with a caption supplied by the user.

You'll see how to configure the separate containers to communicate with one another, work with environment variables, and persist data to your local machine. Along the way, you'll pick up some tips on useful commands and bash scripting. Finally, you'll learn how to use Docker Compose to make it easy to run multiple containers simultaneously.


Docker containers wrap a piece of software in a complete filesystem that contains everything needed to run: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries – anything that can be installed on a server. This guarantees that the software will always run the same, regardless of its environment.

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Containerize Full-Stack JavaScript Applications with Docker

GraphQL is a fan favorite for good reason. It lets a client make specific, complex, and/or aggregate queries for data, and it’s user-friendly to boot.

If you’ve been meaning to learn GraphQL and start harnessing its powers, this is a great place to start.

This course is for GraphQL newbies with a basic understanding of React. It focuses on the client-side implementation of GraphQL usage using the Apollo client.

We’ll start with a guide on how to add the Apollo client to an existing project, then move on using the Query and Mutation components to fetch and manipulate data using a GraphQL API.

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

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GraphQL Data in React with Apollo Client

In this course we will take a simple Node.js app that connects to a MongoDB database and uses an Express web server, and learn how to setup a full software development deployment process as well as how to properly “Dockerize” the app. 

We’ll step through setting up proper version control techniques, managing configuring within the environment, setting up proper build/deploy/run processes, and all with abiding by Docker best practices. We’ll also make sure our deployment is setup for scale, and have consistent development practices in place for reliable app deployments.

Build a Twelve-Factor Node.js App with Docker

Zeit’s mission statement is to ‘Make Cloud computing as easy and accessible as Mobile computing.’ To that end, they’ve released some pretty amazing and powerful tools. In this course we’re going to take a look at `now`, their deployment tool, to see why it’s hands-down the simplest way to launch node applications, docker containers and even static files to the cloud.


We’ll also dig into some of now’s more advanced capabilities, including host aliasing, environment variables and integration with hosted databases.

Deploy Web Apps with Zeit Now

ClojureScript is a compiler for Clojure that targets JavaScript. It emits JavaScript code which is compatible with the advanced compilation mode of the Google Closure optimizing compiler.

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In this lesson I show you how to get and manipulate command-line arguments in Clojure/ClojureScript by writing a small program that greets you by name. I also show how comments are delimited, how to get a value out of a sequence, how to bind a symbol to a value, and how to define a function.

Handle command-line arguments in ClojureScript


Clojure is a dynamic, general-purpose programming language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language, yet remains completely dynamic – every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection.

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In this lesson I show what a Clojure keyword is and why we prefer them as keys in maps; and the three ways we can look up a value in a map.

Keywords and Map Lookup in Clojure and ClojureScript

Apollo provides a universal GraphQL API on top of your existing services, so you can build new application features fast without waiting on backend changes.

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Apollo Server is a GraphQL server that listens for incoming HTTP requests on a single endpoint.  In this lesson, we will stand up a simple GraphQL service that handles a query for total days skied during a season.

Create a GraphQL API with Apollo Server 2.0

To query a GraphQL API, all you need to do is send an HTTP request that includes the query operation in the body of the request. In this lesson, we will use the browser’s fetch method to request the total days skied from our GraphQL API.

Fetch Data from a GraphQL API

Created by the team at Prisma, graphql-request is a lightweight package that can be used to send queries to any GraphQL API. Sending a request with graphql-request uses less syntax than a fetch request. In this lesson, we will query the totalDays field using this helper package.

Query a GraphQL API with graphql-request

Apollo Client allows you to build performant, production-ready applications that consume data from GraphQL services. In this lesson, we will query the totalDays field using Apollo Client.

Send a GraphQL Query with Apollo Client

React Apollo is a component library that we can use to rapidly build GraphQL client applications with React. In this lesson, we get our React app ready by setting up the Apollo Provider and sending our query using the Query component.

Set Up a React GraphQL Client Application with react-apollo

The Query component is used to render the state of the network request along with the data that is returned from the GraphQL API. In this lesson, we will refactor our application to include an App component that displays the resulting count returned by the totalDays field.

Display Query Results using the Query Component 

We can read data from and write data to the cache directly with Apollo Client. In this video, we’ll update the UI by interacting with the cache instead of sending an additional request to the GraphQL server.

Update the Apollo Local Cache with the readQuery and writeQuery Methods

Queries get data from GraphQL services. If we want to change data, we will use GraphQL mutations. In this lesson, we’ll look at how to design GraphQL mutations to increment or decrement the number of ski days on record.

Change Data with GraphQL Mutations

Apollo Client comes with a local cache. The cache is where Apollo Client saves query results. You can read directly from or write directly to the cache which will allow you to reduce the number of network requests that your application makes. In this lesson, we will write the mutation results directly to the cache using the writeQuery method.

Update the Local Apollo Cache after a Mutation Using writeQuery

Using the GraphQL Schema Definition Language, we can define types that reflect all of the objects available on our API. In this lesson, we will create a SkiDay type and return a list of SkiDay objects with an allDays query. We will also create an enum, which describes a restricted list of allowed values for a particular field.

Create a GraphQL Object Type and Query a List of Objects

The addDay mutation should add details about each ski day. In this lesson, we’ll capture argument values from the GraphQL mutation and use this to change the ski day array.

Add Data to an Array with a GraphQL Mutation

Resolvers are functions that return data for specific fields. In this lesson, we’ll take a look at how to throw errors within resolvers if the data passed as arguments is incorrect or insufficient.

Incorporate Custom Error Handling within GraphQL Resolvers

GraphQL has five built-in scalar types that can be returned from a field: Int, Float, Boolean, String, and ID. It is also possible to create and validate your own custom scalar if you want to return a single value or leaf instead of an object from a field. In this lesson, we’ll build a custom scalar type to handle parsing and serializing dates.

Define a Custom Scalar Type for a GraphQL API

If you want to be able to parse and serialize custom scalar types sent as arguments, you’ll add the parseValue and parseLiteral functions to the custom scalar constructor. In this video, we’ll take a closer look at these functions and how they can be used to transform data passed by the client.


Parsing GraphQL Mutation Arguments with Custom Scalars

When passing arguments to a GraphQL mutation, you can send them inline, or you can wrap them in an input type. In this lesson, we’ll create an input type for the addDay mutation which will allow us to pass an entire object as an argument.

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