setting up graphQL on OpenShift - postgresql

Question

I'm learning how to set up a server on OpenShift that uses node, express, GraphQL and Postgres and I need some help.
When trying to set up the GraphQL Server I've been following this and it works on my local machine:
import Express from 'express';
import GraphQL from 'express-graphql';
import Schema from './db/GQLschema';
const app = Express();
app.use('/graphql', GraphQL({
schema: Schema,
pretty: true,
graphiql: true
}));
...
I'm using the server.js template provided by OpenShift so the above changes to:
...
self.app = express();
self.app.configure(function() {
self.app.use('/public', express.static(__dirname+'/public'));
self.app.use('/graphql', GraphQL({
schema: Schema,
pretty: true,
graphiql: true
}));
});
...
But this doesn't work when pushed up to OpenShift. I get 'Internal Server Error' instead of the graphiql interface.
I'm new to this, but here are some guesses as to what it might have to do with:
Connecting to database
Missing dependencies
Connecting to database: I have 2 json config files. One for my local machine which is connected using a port-forward SSH tunnel to OpenShift. That works fine. The other is one for production. In it I have all the strings for the database name, user, port, host, and password, that OpenShift provided me. I'm using the config library which looks at NODE_ENV to decide which config json file to use. I set the NODE_ENV variable on OpenShift to production. When I query it, it shows all the correct strings. Is there something else I need to set?
Missing dependencies: To keep it neat, I am keeping my back-end code separate from my front-end code. So the back-end code has only the express, graphql, sequelize, config, and pg stuff installed. Do I need something else to make the graphiql page work? Also, I put all the /node_modules/ in the .gitignore file -- I assumed that OpenShift installs them post push. Was that the right thing to do?
Would appreciate any help!

Answer 1

OK - I solved it by doing the following:
in the openshift cli tools turn on error logs
rhc tail -a <yourappname>
This will give you some clues. In my case it was a message from express-graphql "unresolved promise". After researching I found that if you install and save es-promise and add this line to the top of the server.js file:
require ('es6-promise').polyfill();
Hope that helps someone else!