Building a modern data archive with React, GraphQL, and friends

How do you use modern web technologies to build a user-friendly browser-based data archive? We answer this question for the data archive of the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) and Southern African Large Telescope, which lets users make complex searches, view FITS files and make data requests. The software stack includes React, NodeJS, GraphQL and PostgreSQL. The archive is hosted on virtual Ubuntu servers. The development workflow uses tools like Github Actions, Reviewable and Prettier. The archive forms part of the SAAO's artificial intelligence based approach to observing.