Graphile Engine

Graphile Engine enables you to build high-performance easily-extensible GraphQL schemas by combining plugins.

NOTE: You might be looking for PostGraphile which is Graphile Engine applied to a PostgreSQL database.

Crowd-funded open-source software

To help us develop this software sustainably under the MIT license, we ask all individuals and businesses that use it to help support its ongoing maintenance and development via sponsorship.

Click here to find out more about sponsors and sponsorship.

And please give some love to our featured sponsors 🤩:

Story.ai *

Surge *

Chad Furman *

Postlight *

Openbase *

* Sponsors the entire Graphile suite

Monorepo contents

graphile-build: The core of Graphile Engine: a plugin system that enables you to build a GraphQL schema out of plugins with advanced performance capabilities enabled via GraphQL look-ahead functionality.

graphile-build-pg: A selection of graphile-build plugins related to PostgreSQL: schema introspection, generation of fields and types for all tables, computed columns, query procedures, etc - if there's certain features you don't want, simply don't use that plugin!

graphile-utils: A collection of helper utilities to make writing graphile-build plugins easier.

postgraphile-core: Contains the GraphQL schema functionality of PostGraphile, does not contain the web layer.

graphql-parse-resolve-info: Parses a GraphQLResolveInfo object into a tree of the fields that are being requested to enable optimisations to your GraphQL schema (e.g. we use it in graphile-build-pg to determine which fields are required from the SQL database).

Brief History

Proof of concept was built by @Benjie in 2017, growing out of a need for greater performance, easier extensibility and greater customisation in PostGraphQL. Over the next year thanks to the input of the community and ongoing development and testing, Graphile Engine has matured into the production-ready system it is today.

Development

Below is a quick-start, for more detailed instructions, please see the CONTRIBUTING.md documentation in PostGraphile.

yarn
yarn lerna bootstrap
yarn watch

yarn watch will keep monitoring and compiling the babel files, so open another terminal to run the tests (Note: your PostgreSQL server must be configured for logical decoding):

createdb graphileengine_test
export TEST_DATABASE_URL="postgres:///graphileengine_test"
yarn lerna run test

If the above succeeds, you're good to go! If not, please try again after running yarn install --force and always feel free to reach out via our discord chat on the #core-development channel.

Working with Docker

If you want to work in a Docker environment you can follow the instructions on the wiki.