apollo-server VS graphql-shield

Another interesting point is that executing fetches on the server can allow developers to more easily leverage caching. Next.js already handles caching out-of-the-box and I’m curious to see if the wider adoption of RSC reduces the need to combine React with solutions like Apollo Server and Apollo Client. While there are other benefits to these tools, RSC could provide similar caching behavior without the need to invest in a GraphQL solution.

There are several GraphQL server implementations, however, for this tutorial, we'll utilize Apollo GraphQL's Apollo Server, a lightweight and flexible JavaScript server that makes it easy to build GraphQL APIs.

As I mentioned, their main GraphQL server package is[1], so that's where the confusion came from. Thanks.

[1] https://github.com/apollographql/apollo-server/blob/9817bc47...

While working on this blog post, I learned that Apollo Server, the most popular GraphQL server for typescript, uses a similar method for adding error codes to GraphQL. It even lets you add custom errors. Hopefully, someday other GraphQL server projects will follow them. Until then, we’ve got a strong indication we took the right approach.

GraphQL is just a schema, there are many different implementations of a GraphQL server, AppSync being one of them. I mentioned Apollo server in this series as well.

After some head-scratching, I opened an issue on Apollo Server’s GitHub repository. There, Apollo Server contributor @​glasser shared a helpful suggestion: why not invoke our AuthPlugin from Apollo Server’s context function? Throwing from context would ensure we can control the HTTP status response without having to introduce more methods and error checks to our AuthPlugin (like unexpectedErrorProcessingRequest). With that suggestion in mind, we rewrote our AuthPlugin as follows:

Apollo as a middleware in Express.js, actually.

Apollo Server 3 Cookie Issue #5775

Lastly, instead of writing our API core ourselves, we'll be using the star of this episode --- Apollo Server (a.k.a. GraphQL server). It has detailed documentation available here.

- https://github.com/dimatill/graphql-shield/issues/988 - https://github.com/dimatill/graphql-shield/issues/1485

Second a NextJS app is deployed to Vercel containing a GraphQL server function. This is an Apollo server that consumes the halo-graphql package using GraphQL Modules. The server also implements caching and rate limiting using GraphQL Shield.

GraphQL Shield is a great tool for creating authorization layers that has vast adoption from the community. In fact, GraphQL AuthZ is highly inspired by GraphQL Shield! However, GraphQL Shield uses a different approach compared to GraphQL AuthZ for applying authorization rules.

Haven't used it yet but GraphQL Shield looks pretty good. https://github.com/maticzav/graphql-shield

You can also use libraries like GraphQL Shield which offers powerful middlewares to do this. But remember that authorization does come with attached cost since you are running a specific logic in/before your resolvers for all the fields which you want to authorize.

Try graphql-shield