graphql-helix VS envelop

Depends on language, I've build GraphQL servers in a few, though mostly JavaScript and Python. For Python I used to use Graphene, these days I use Strawberry.

For JavaScript, I originally used graphql-js and express-graphql, as these were the original libraries and I was a literal day 1 adopter. All the libraries are essentially just wrappers around graphql-js, so it's still viable to use directly. But for schema-building I now use Pothos (https://pothos-graphql.dev/), I'd probably use graphql-helix as the http layer (https://github.com/contra/graphql-helix).

If you want a lower level graphql server https://graphql-helix.vercel.app/ or https://benzene.vercel.app/ might be worth checking out.

While there are many GraphQL server packages available, we need one that will play nicely with Nuxt3's server engine (Nitro / h3). In the spirit of keeping things extensible and framework-agnostic, GraphQL Helix seems like a really good choice. Let's add it to our project:

Looks interesting, have you tried graphql-helix?

When using a JavaScript server, a convenient way to achieve this is with GraphQL Helix, which decouples the handling of the HTTP request from the GraphQL server. With Helix, we can have the routing logic be handled by a Node.js web framework (such as Express.js or Fastify), and then — depending on the requested path (i.e., the requested endpoint — we can provide the corresponding schema to the GraphQL server.

GraphQL Helix is a framework and runtime agnostic collection of utility functions for building your own GraphQL HTTP server. Instead of providing a complete HTTP server or middleware plugin function, GraphQL Helix only provides a handful of functions for turning an HTTP request into a GraphQL execution result. You decide how to send back the response.

import { envelop, useSchema, useLogger } from '@envelop/core'; import fastify from 'fastify'; import { processRequest, getGraphQLParameters } from 'graphql-helix'; // This creates the `getEnveloped` function for us. Behind the scense the wrapped functions are created once, here. const getEnveloped = envelop({ plugins: [useSchema(schema), useLogger()], }); const app = fastify(); app.route({ method: ['POST'], url: '/graphql', async handler(req, res) { // Here we can pass the request and make available as part of the "context". // The return value is the a GraphQL-proxy that exposes all the functions. const { parse, validate, contextFactory, execute, schema } = getEnveloped({ req, }); const request = { body: req.body, headers: req.headers, method: req.method, query: req.query, }; const { operationName, query, variables } = getGraphQLParameters(request); // Here, we pass our custom functions to Helix, and it will take care of the rest. const result = await processRequest({ operationName, query, variables, request, schema, parse, validate, execute, contextFactory, }); if (result.type === 'RESPONSE') { res.status(result.status); res.send(result.payload); } else { // You can find a complete example with Subscriptions and stream/defer here: // https://github.com/contrawork/graphql-helix/blob/master/examples/fastify/server.ts res.send({ errors: [{ message: 'Not Supported in this demo' }] }); } }, }); app.listen(3000, () => { console.log(`GraphQL server is running...`); });

Fortunately, we now have libraries like Graphql Helix, which, in my humble opinion, should replace express-graphql as the reference HTTP implementation since GraphQL Helix is also not tied to any web server framework.

If you are using Node.js there are a lot of implementations of GraphQL servers with a few being express-graphql, apollo-server, mercurius, graphql-helix and more. And if you are using other languages, you can see a great list here

Graphql Helix

The Guild took over the development of GraphQL Yoga from Prisma in early 2021, and with the growing community of tools in the GraphQL space, most recently Envelop, we were able to rewrite GraphQL Yoga 2.0 from scratch with easy setup, performance, and developer experience at the core.

Ideally, you already have your basic envelop setup with your http framework of choice. This guide we will be based on the graphql-helix fastify example, but the code can be easily transferred to any other example as listed on our Integrations and Examples documentation. In case you are hitting any roadblocks feel free to reach out to us via the chat box on this page! The full code of the end-result is also available in our examples graphql-helix-auth0 fastify example.

Make “hard” GraphQL capabilities easy by installing powerful plugins (Caching, Tracing with Prometheus/DataDog/NewRelic/Sentry/OpenTelemetry/ApolloTracing, Loggers, GraphQL-Jit, Persisted Operations, Security with rate-limit/depth-limit/Auth0 and many others from the Plugins Hub)

I started reimplementing the logic from GitHub over here https://github.com/dotansimha/envelop/pull/474

We just today published a new plugin for envelop (GraphQL execution flow customization layer) that allow rejecting GraphQL operations before being executed based on the selection set of the operation. It is pretty flexible and you can limit the access dynamically based on the GraphQL context. E.g. this allows loading the permission information from the database, the user record, or any other remote service. https://github.com/dotansimha/envelop/tree/main/packages/plugins/operation-field-permissions

We are already having a spec compatible implementation available that you can start using with envelop, without havign to wait for official graphql-js support to land: https://github.com/dotansimha/envelop/pull/179