graphql-yoga

Fully-featured GraphQL Server with focus on easy setup, performance & great developer experience

Overview

• Easiest way to run a GraphQL server: Sensible defaults & includes everything you need with minimal setup.
• Includes Subscriptions: Built-in support for GraphQL subscriptions using WebSockets.
• Compatible: Works with all GraphQL clients (Apollo, Relay...) and fits seamless in your GraphQL workflow.

graphql-yoga is based on the following libraries & tools:

• express/apollo-server: Performant, extensible web server framework
• graphql-subscriptions/subscriptions-transport-ws: GraphQL subscriptions server
• graphql.js/graphql-tools: GraphQL engine & schema helpers
• graphql-playground: Interactive GraphQL IDE

Features

• GraphQL spec-compliant
• File upload
• GraphQL Subscriptions
• TypeScript typings
• GraphQL Playground
• Extensible via Express middlewares
• Apollo Tracing
• Accepts both application/json and application/graphql content-type
• Runs everywhere: Can be deployed via now, up, AWS Lambda, Heroku etc

Install

yarn add graphql-yoga

Usage

Quickstart (Hosted demo)

import { GraphQLServer } from 'graphql-yoga'
// ... or using `require()`
// const { GraphQLServer } = require('graphql-yoga')

const typeDefs = `
  type Query {
    hello(name: String): String!
  }
`

const resolvers = {
  Query: {
    hello: (_, { name }) => `Hello ${name || 'World'}`,
  },
}

const server = new GraphQLServer({ typeDefs, resolvers })
server.start(() => console.log('Server is running on localhost:4000'))

To get started with graphql-yoga, follow the instructions in the READMEs of the examples.

API

GraphQLServer

constructor(props: Props): GraphQLServer

The props argument accepts the following fields:

Key	Type	Default	Note
typeDefs	String	null	Contains GraphQL type definitions in SDL or file path to type definitions (required if schema is not provided *)
resolvers	Object	null	Contains resolvers for the fields specified in typeDefs (required if schema is not provided *)
schema	Object	null	An instance of GraphQLSchema (required if typeDefs and resolvers are not provided *)
context	Object or Function	{}	Contains custom data being passed through your resolver chain. This can be passed in as an object, or as a Function with the signature (req: ContextParameters) => any **

(*) There are two major ways of providing the schema information to the constructor:

1. Provide typeDefs and resolvers and omit the schema, in this case graphql-yoga will construct the GraphQLSchema instance using makeExecutableSchema from graphql-tools.
2. Provide the schema directly and omit typeDefs and resolvers.

(**) Notice that the req argument is an object of the shape { request, connection } which either carries a request: Request property (in case it's a Query/Mutation resolver) or a connection: SubscriptionOptions property (in case it's a Subscription resolver). Request is imported from Express.js. SubscriptionOptions is from the graphql-subscriptions package. SubscriptionOptions are getting the connectionParams automatically injected under SubscriptionOptions.context.[CONNECTION_PARAMETER_NAME]

Here is example of creating a new server:

const typeDefs = `
  type Query {
    hello(name: String): String!
  }
`

const resolvers = {
  Query: {
    hello: (_, { name }) => `Hello ${name || 'World'}`,
  },
}

const server = new GraphQLServer({ typeDefs, resolvers })

start(options: Options, callback: ((options: Options) => void) = (() => null)): Promise<void>

Once your GraphQLServer is instantiated, you can call the start method on it. It takes two arguments: options, the options object defined above, and callback, a function that's invoked right before the server is started. As an example, the callback can be used to print information that the server was now started.

The options object has the following fields:

Key	Type	Default	Note
cors	Object	null	Contains configuration options for cors
tracing	Boolean or String	'http-header'	Indicates whether Apollo Tracing should be en- or disabled for your server (if a string is provided, accepted values are: 'enabled', 'disabled', 'http-header')
port	Number	4000	Determines the port your server will be listening on (note that you can also specify the port by setting the PORT environment variable)
endpoint	String	'/'	Defines the HTTP endpoint of your server
subscriptions	Object or String or false	'/'	Defines the subscriptions (websocket) endpoint for your server; accepts an object with subscription server options path, keepAlive, onConnect and onDisconnect; setting to false disables subscriptions completely
playground	String or false	'/'	Defines the endpoint where you can invoke the Playground; setting to false disables the playground endpoint
uploads	UploadOptions or false or undefined	null	Provides information about upload limits; the object can have any combination of the following three keys: maxFieldSize, maxFileSize, maxFiles; each of these have values of type Number; setting to false disables file uploading

Additionally, the options object exposes these apollo-server options:

Key	Type	Note
cacheControl	Boolean	Enable extension that returns Cache Control data in the response
formatError	Number	A function to apply to every error before sending the response to clients
logFunction	LogFunction	A function called for logging events such as execution times
rootValue	any	RootValue passed to GraphQL execution
validationRules	Array of functions	DAdditional GraphQL validation rules to be applied to client-specified queries
fieldResolver	GraphQLFieldResolver	Specifify a custom default field resolver function
formatParams	Function	A function applied for each query in a batch to format parameters before execution
formatResponse	Function	A function applied to each response after execution
debug	boolean	Print additional debug logging if execution errors occur

const options = {
  port: 8000,
  endpoint: '/graphql',
  subscriptions: '/subscriptions',
  playground: '/playground',
}

server.start(options, ({ port }) => console.log(`Server started, listening on port ${port} for incoming requests.`))

PubSub

See the original documentation in graphql-subscriptions.

Endpoints

Examples

There are three examples demonstrating how to quickly get started with graphql-yoga:

• hello-world: Basic setup for building a schema and allowing for a hello query.
• subscriptions: Basic setup for using subscriptions with a counter that increments every 2 seconds and triggers a subscriptions.
• fullstack: Fullstack example based on create-react-app demonstrating how to query data from graphql-yoga with Apollo Client 2.0.

Workflow

Once your graphql-yoga server is running, you can use GraphQL Playground out of the box – typically running on localhost:4000. (Read here for more information.)

Deployment

now

To deploy your graphql-yoga server with now, follow these instructions:

1. Download Now Desktop
2. Navigate to the root directory of your graphql-yoga server
3. Run now in your terminal

Heroku

To deploy your graphql-yoga server with Heroku, follow these instructions:

1. Download and install the Heroku Command Line Interface (previously Heroku Toolbelt)
2. Log In to the Heroku CLI with heroku login
3. Navigate to the root directory of your graphql-yoga server
4. Create the Heroku instance by executing heroku create
5. Deploy your GraphQL server by executing git push heroku master

up (Coming soon 🔜 )

AWS Lambda (Coming soon 🔜 )

FAQ

How does graphql-yoga compare to apollo-server and other tools?

As mentioned above, graphql-yoga is built on top of a variety of other packages, such as graphql.js, express and apollo-server. Each of these provide a certain piece of functionality required for building a GraphQL server.

Using these packages individually incurs overhead in the setup process and requires you to write a lot of boilerplate. graphql-yoga abstracts away the initial complexity and required boilerplate and let's you get started quickly with a set of sensible defaults for your server configuration.

graphql-yoga is like create-react-app for building GraphQL servers.

Can't I just setup my own GraphQL server using express and graphql.js?

graphql-yoga is all about convenience and a great "Getting Started"-experience by abstracting away the complexity that comes when you're building your own GraphQL from scratch. It's a pragmatic approach to bootstrap a GraphQL server, much like create-react-app removes friction when first starting out with React.

Whenever the defaults of graphql-yoga are too tight of a corset for you, you can simply eject from it and use the tooling it's build upon - there's no lock-in or any other kind of magic going on preventing you from this.

How to eject from the standard express setup?

The core value of graphql-yoga is that you don't have to write the boilerplate required to configure your express.js application. However, once you need to add more customized behaviour to your server, the default configuration provided by graphql-yoga might not suit your use case any more. For example, it might be the case that you want to add more custom middleware to your server, like for logging or error reporting.

For these cases, GraphQLServer exposes the express.Application directly via its express property:

server.express.use(myMiddleware())

Middlewares can also be added specifically to the GraphQL endpoint route, by using:

server.express.post(server.options.endpoint, myMiddleware())

Any middlewares you add to that route, will be added right before the apollo-server-express middleware.

Help & Community

Join our Slack community if you run into issues or have questions. We love talking to you!