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Graphile Build

Graphile Build is a toolkit for auto-generating flexible and extensible GraphQL APIs from arbitrary data sources.

The plugin system enables adding and removing of entire classes of features easily (and enables your users to write their own or community extensions). The behavior system gives users fine grained control over which features are enabled for the various entities in their system. The integration with Grafast means that the generated schemas can typically out-perform even hand-rolled schemas using traditional techniques such as resolvers and DataLoader.

An example of a system build with Graphile Build is PostGraphile, which automatically builds a high performance, highly customizeable, and best practices GraphQL API from your PostgreSQL database.

Automatically build GraphQL objects and fields through database introspection​

The core graphile-build library treats GraphQL as a first-class target, but does not know anything about databases or other data stores. By writing plugins to introspect your datastore you can automatically build your GraphQL objects and eliminate the development work required to keep your codebase and datastore schema in sync.

graphile-build-pg is a collection of plugins which adds extensive support for the popular PostgreSQL database system by performing introspection of your database schema and automatically building the relevant GraphQL objects and fields based on the tables, columns, functions, relations that it finds. This is the core of PostGraphile.

But Graphile Build isn't limited to PostgreSQL, you can build graphile-build plugins for anything that Node.js can communicate with.

Automatically update your running GraphQL schema without the need to restart​

For example: when your underlying data structure changes your Graphile Build plugins can trigger a rebuild event and you'll automatically be supplied with a fresh new GraphQL schema to replace the out-of-date one - no need to restart your server!

Quick to start​

import { buildSchema, defaultPreset } from "graphile-build";
import { printSchema } from "graphql";

const preset = {
  extends: [
    defaultPreset,
    // Add more presets here!
  ],
};

const schema = await buildSchema(preset);
console.log(printSchema(schema));