Well what do you know, I had a pleasure getting started with Ruby on Rails framework. I liked the productivity that it has and how most of pieces were pretty straightforward to do.

Today, I am going go over on how to setup GraphQL application with Ruby on Rails framework in API only mode.

First of, obviously, you would need to have to have Ruby language installed on your system. I used rbenv to manage my ruby versions, it is similar to nvm or sdkman if you are coming from JVM world.

brew install rbenv
# then install actual ruby version
# for this blog post I am going to use ruby version 3
rbenv install 3.0.1

# Downloading ruby-3.0.1.tar.gz...
# -> https://cache.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/3.0/ruby-3.0.1.tar.gz
# Installing ruby-3.0.1...
# ruby-build: using readline from homebrew

# you can also list versions that you can install with rbenv
# if you wish choose something else
rbenv install --list

Let's then install rails gem and bundler to manage our dependencies.

gem install rails
gem install bundler

Alright, so nwo we have rails cli tool installed, it can generate a lot of boilerplate code for us like models, GraphQL types and etc.

Next, we will start new application without frontend and with postgres as our database choice

rails new app --api -d postgresql

Once that installed, let's go inside of that folder and install GraphQL gem

bundle add graphql

Bootstrap GraphQL configuration and some built-in types

rails generate graphql:install

Now everything located under app/graphql is obviously GraphQL related stuff