Skip to main content

Cloudflare Workers

Let's deploy our application to Cloudflare Workers.

The application needs a Postgres database. We will use Neon, a "multi-cloud fully managed Postgres with a generous free tier". This free tier is perfect for this tutorial. If you want to use other Postgres providers, the basic steps remain the same: create a database and set the EXO_POSTGRES_URL environment variable to point to it.

Creating a new application​

If you already have an application, you can skip this step.

Let's start from scratch to keep this tutorial standalone. However, you can also use an existing application like the concert management application developed in the Application Tutorial guide.

Let's create a new application:

exo new todo
cd todo

Creating Deployment Files​

Exograph CLI includes a command to simplify deploying to Cloudflare Workers.

exo deploy cf-worker

This command creates the WebAssembly binaries, wrangler.toml, and .dev.vars to configure the application.

The wrangler.toml file defines environment variables and bindings for your production deployment. You should commit this file to your repository (therefore, you should not include secrets in this file).

The .dev.vars file contains the environment variables for local development. You must update this file to point to a development Postgres database. Typically, you don't need to commit this file to your repository.

Trying it out locally​

To run the backend locally, modify .dev.vars to point to your development Postgres URL. Then run the following command:

npx wrangler dev

It will start a local server at http://localhost:8787 (it may use another port if 8787 isn't available). To test the application, you can launch exo playground and set the endpoint to http://localhost:8787.

exo playground --endpoint http://localhost:8787

You can try queries and mutation to test the application with your development Postgres database.

Deploying to Cloudflare Workers​

Before you try accessing the application, you must connect the worker to a Postgres database. You can do so by provisioning a Postgres database and setting the EXO_POSTGRES_URL secret:

exo secret set EXO_POSTGRES_URL <postgres-database-url>

Alternatively, for database providers like Neon and Supabase, you can use the Cloudflare Workers "Integration" tab, click "Add Integration", and follow the instructions. The result will be setting the DATABASE_URL secret for you.

Next, run the database migrations to create the necessary tables in the database.

exo schema migrate --database <postgres-database-url> --apply-to-database

Finally, let's deploy to Cloudflare.

npx wrangler deploy

That's it! You now have a GraphQL server connected to a Postgres database running on Cloudflare Workers.

If you wish to play with the APIs, launch the playground by running the following command:

exo playground --endpoint <cloudflare-worker-url>

You can try the typical queries, such as creating a new todo, as seen in the Getting Started guide.

Improving latency​

With the earlier configuration, the Exograph worker connected directly to the database. Due to the ephemeral nature of Cloudflare Workers, every request establishes a new connection to the database, which can be slow. You can improve the latency by using Hyperdrive.

To set up a Hyperdrive, use the npx wrangler hyperdrive create command or the Cloudflare Worker's dashboard. Then add the following to your wrangler.toml (you will get the id from the command output or the Hyperdrive dashboard):

EXO_HYPERDRIVE_BINDING = "<binding-name>"

[[hyperdrive]]
binding = "<binding-name>"
id = "..."

The worker will now use Hyperdrive to manage the database connections, significantly reducing the latency of the requests.