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bdougie.live

This blog powered by GitHub issues

A location where individuals can come together and watch a few people stream their code. This repo is powered by oneblog.

Schedule for streams can be found at twitch.tv/bdougieYO.

Plan for the future.

  1. Invite others to live code with @bdougie
  2. Show off code and talk about projects.
  3. Answer code questions

Links

Details

This repo powers the OneGraph Product Updates blog at onegraph.com/changelog.

All of the posts on the changelog are stored as issues on the OneGraph changelog repo.

Build a blog powered by GitHub issues

Deploy with Vercel

This repo allows you to generate a blog from GitHub issues on a repo. It powers the OneGraph Product Updates blog, Stepan Parunashvili's blog, bdougie.live, and more.

All of the posts are stored as issues on the repo (e.g. OneGraph/onegraph-changelog).

When you visit the page at onegraph.com/changelog, a GraphQL query fetches the issues from GitHub via OneGraph's persisted queries and renders them as blog posts.

The persisted queries are stored with authentication credentials for GitHub that allows them to make authenticated requests. Persisting the queries locks them down so that they can't be made to send arbitrary requests to GitHub.

You can learn more about persisted queries in the docs.

Setup

Use an existing OneGraph app or sign up sign up at OneGraph to create a new app.

Copy /.env.example to /.env and set the following environment variables.

Environment variables

Environment Variable Description
OG_GITHUB_TOKEN A server-side access token created on OneGraph, used as the default auth for the persisted queries that will fetch the issues. To create a new one, go the "Server-side Auth" tab in the OneGraph dashboard for your app, click the "Create Token" button, and add GitHub to the services. Keep this token safe, because it has access to your GitHub data.
OG_DASHBOARD_ACCESS_TOKEN An API token that allows you to create persisted queries on OneGraph. Go to the "Persisted queries" tab on the OneGraph dashboard, scroll down, and click "Create token". This will create a scoped token for your app that can create persisted queries on your behalf.
NEXT_PUBLIC_ONEGRAPH_APP_ID The id of your OneGraph app. You can get this from the OneGraph dashboard
NEXT_PUBLIC_TITLE The title of your site
NEXT_PUBLIC_DESCRIPTION A short description of your site.
NEXT_PUBLIC_GITHUB_REPO_OWNER The owner of the repo that we should pull issues from (e.g. linus in linus/oneblog). If you're using the Vercel deploy button, you don't need to provide this.
NEXT_PUBLIC_GITHUB_REPO_NAME The name of the repo that we should pull issues from (e.g. oneblog in linus/oneblog). If you're using the Vercel deploy button, you don't need to provide this.

Setup relay

Remove the generated files (they're tied to the OneGraph app they were generated with):

yarn relay:clean
# which runs rm -r src/__generated__

(Note: any time you change the variables in .env, it's a good idea to stop the relay compiler, remove the files in src/__generated__, and restart the compiler)

Install dependencies

yarn install

Run the Relay compiler

This project uses Relay as its GraphQL client because of its high-quality compiler and great support for persisted queries.

In another terminal window, start the relay compiler

yarn relay --watch

You may need to install watchman, a file watching service. On mac, do brew install watchman. On Windows or Linux, follow the instructions at https://facebook.github.io/watchman/docs/install.html.

Start the server

Now that we've generated the relay files, we can start the server.

yarn start

The project will load at http://localhost:3000.

Deploying

The project comes with setups for deploying to Google's Firebase, Zeit's Now, Netlify, and Fly.io.

For each of these, you'll have to add the site that you're deploying to on the CORS origins on the OneGraph dashboard.

Deploy with Vercel

Use the deploy button to set up a new repo:

Deploy with Vercel

If you've already set up the repo, just run the vercel command.

# If not installed
# npm i -g vercel

vercel

If you see an error when you visit the site, make sure the site's origin is listed in the CORS origins for your app on the OneGraph dashboard.

Deploying with Firebase

Please open an issue if you'd like help deploying with Firebase.

Deploying with Netlify

Please open an issue if you'd like help deploying with Netlify.

Deploying with Fly.io

Please open an issue if you'd like help deploying with Fly.io

Project setup

Client

The client is an ordinary React app. The best to place to start is /src/App.js.

It uses Grommet as the UI library. Visit https://v2.grommet.io/components to view the documentation for Grommet.

It uses Relay as the GraphQL client. https://relay.dev/docs/en/graphql-in-relay has a good introduction to Relay.

To refresh the GraphQL schema, run yarn fetch-schema. That will fetch the schema from OneGraph and add some client-only directives that we use when we persist the queries to OneGraph.

How persisting works

The persistFunction for the relay compiler is set to /scripts/persistQuery.js. Every time a GraphQL query in the project changes, the relay compiler will call that function with the new query.

That function will parse the query and pull out the @persistedQueryConfiguration directive to determine if any auth should be stored alongside the query. In the changelog, the queries for fetching posts use persisted auth, but the mutations for adding reactions require the user to log in with OneGraph and use their auth.

The @persistedQueryConfiguration directive is stripped from the query and it is uploaded to OneGraph via a GraphQL mutation. Then the id for the persisted query is returned from the function. Relay stores the id in its generated file and it's used the next time the query is sent to the server.

Server

The server uses Next.js to allow us to render the content on the server. This helps with SEO and allows people to view the blog with Javascript turned off.

When a request comes in to the server, the server creates a mock Relay environment and prefetches the query for the route using fetchQuery from relay-runtime. This populates the record source that Relay uses to render.

React renders the app to a string, which is sent to the client.

On the client, React rehydates the app. To prevent Relay from showing a loading state, we inject the serialized record source with getStaticProps. That data is stored in the environment before Relay makes its first query. The fetchPolicy opt is set to "store-and-network" so that it uses the data from the store instead of showing a loading state.