Who moved my error codes? Adding error types to your GoLang GraphQL Server

• gqlgen

  43 9,630 9.3 Go

  go generate based graphql server library

  

GraphQL’s spec, as it turns out, does not specify how servers should handle internal errors at all, leaving it entirely to the choice of the frameworks’ creators. Take for example our GoLang GraphQL framework of choice - gqlgen. It makes no distinction between intentional and unexpected errors: all errors are returned as-is to the client within the error message. Internal errors, which often contain sensitive information like network details and internal URIs, would leak to clients easily if not caught manually by the programmer.

• graphql-go

  11 9,714 2.8 Go

  An implementation of GraphQL for Go / Golang (by graphql-go)

  

And gqlgen is not alone in this. We found several more GraphQL frameworks that don’t take it upon themselves to address this problem. Widely used GraphQL server implementations, such as graphql-go/graphql and Python’s graphene, have the exact same gap of exposing messages of unexpected errors by default.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• foundation

  210 86 0.0

  GraphQL Foundation Charter and Legal Documents (by graphql)

  

A few months ago, we at Otterize went on a journey to migrate many of our APIs, including the ones used between our back-end services and the ones used by our web app, to GraphQL. While we enjoyed many GraphQL features, we faced along the way a few interesting challenges which required creative solutions.

• apollo-server

  66 13,663 9.1 TypeScript

  🌍  Spec-compliant and production ready JavaScript GraphQL server that lets you develop in a schema-first way. Built for Express, Connect, Hapi, Koa, and more.

  

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.

• Graphene

  19 7,973 4.3 Python

  GraphQL framework for Python

  

And gqlgen is not alone in this. We found several more GraphQL frameworks that don’t take it upon themselves to address this problem. Widely used GraphQL server implementations, such as graphql-go/graphql and Python’s graphene, have the exact same gap of exposing messages of unexpected errors by default.

• graphql-error-codes-example

  1 0 10.0 Go
  

You may check out the example project to see what our implementation looks like in a small Go project, and how error types affect the client’s behavior. This should help understand where all the snippets come together in an actual working code use case and make a great solution for the missing error codes problem.

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