graphql-multipart-request-spec VS envelop

The GraphQL specification itself doesn't natively support file uploads, so the solution typically involves using extensions or additional libraries. The easiest and most straightforward way is by converting the file to Base64 before sending it to the server, you can include it as a string in the GraphQL request. This offcourse has a downside, it can increase the payload size, so it may not be the most efficient solution for large files. Other options that involve using extensions or additional libraries are using GraphQL multipart request specification and Apollo Server with Apollo Upload Client

Also, we manage to upload files via GraphQL just fine. Turns out nothing prevents you from putting a GraphQL query in a multipart form. Frameworks support this just fine, and if not, just write your own middleware, it's not even that hard.

There is a specification (and implementation) for sending files through GraphQL. https://github.com/jaydenseric/graphql-multipart-request-spec

We figured out that it was possible to reference a file several times by implementing the reference spec (https://github.com/jaydenseric/graphql-multipart-request-spec) for both a client and a server. We have no record of this vulnerability used in the wild, but we know for sure that a lot of popular projects on GitHub are vulnerable.

The GraphQL multipart specification describes how to implement file uploads in GraphQL. While usual GraphQL queries are sent as application/json, file uploads are sent as multipart/form-data. This means that the HTTP request body has multiple parts, and their functions, described in the specification, can be summarized as follows:

Hey, graphql-upload works on top of the graphql-multipart-request-spec, of which you can find the specification here.

In this article you will learn the widely accepted method of implementing file upload which is becoming increasingly popular in new apps. The technique follows the specification by @jaydenseric.

GraphQL-Multipart-Request: enables great file upload support.

Multipart File Uploads ✔️

One important thing which GraphQL Spec did not discuss about is a way to transmit files over the wire when using GraphQL. This is where GraphQL Upload comes in. While not an official spec from GraphQL foundation, Jayden had done a great job to put together a multi part spec to address exactly this problem.

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