API's (How to run an Express GraphQL Server)

This example builds off of the other initial GraphQL setup and initialization so I will begin from the end of that article. I already have an Ubuntu virtual machine in the cloud with Node.js & GraphQL. The cloud server initial setup is done at this point. So now, I am going to continue configuring and modifying a few things to turn this virtual machine into an Express GraphQL Server.

I installed express from the command line with: 

Next I modified the original server.js file I had created. Here I now have a new module which is 'express'.  This will help me to be able to run a webserver and then will mount a GraphQL API server on the HTTP endpoint I have assigned of "/graphql" on my Ubuntu cloud virtual machine.

And now things are beginning to get more interesting. I now have a visual interface with which I can send queries to the API HTTP endpoint. So here when I send a query for '{ hello }' the contents of the variable within my function are returned in GraphQL syntax which works in a very similar manner to JSON. One additional note is that this data exists within an HTTP API endpoint so it can also just be called directly from the URL as:

http://'theSpecificIP':'thePortNumber'/graphql?query={hello}.

Using the GraphiQL interface to issue queries.