Check out the demo at: https://magiql-browser.vercel.app

Important: Very early project and under active development, would love any feedback or help

Goal:
- Browser-like experience for GraphQL API exploration and consumption + all the developer tools (like 'Inspect') that could make up an amazing GraphQL IDE experience (eg. mocking, code-generation, validation)
- Embeddable and composable in other ways (like using the Explorer in API documentation)
- Extendable (all parts, menus, toolbars, and panels) with plugins

Inspirations:

- CodeSandbox
- VS Code
- Web Browsers (like Google Chrome)
- monaco-editor

Install

``bash

npm install @magiql/browser

// or
yarn add @magiql/browser
`

Features

- Language service: supported using web workers (everything is off the main UI thread)
- Uses graphql-language-service
- Based on work on monaco-graphql
- Syntax highlighting
- Schema-aware auto-completions
- Validations and error highlighting
- Formatting on Cmd + S (using prettier)
- Run queries, mutations, and subscriptions (_in development_)
- Explorer: point-and-click UI to manipulate the AST with hints from the schema (_in development_):
- Completely inspired by OneGraph/graphiql-explorer
- Goal: represent the entire AST as an explorer with hints from the schema
- Looks exactly like GraphQL syntax (syntax highlighted), but only the customizable parts should need user input, everything else should be toggles or buttons
- Would allow very easy exploration of API for non technical users as well, could hide text editor also
- Implementation: uses codegen to generate a recoil based AST data structure using the types in the graphql package, the Explorer is also just a renderer of the AST, that can update any part of the AST by updating its atom, and a new AST will be build
- The AST is exported as collection of recoil atoms: can be modified externally by other plugins
- User interface:
- Goal: Browser-like UI for exploring GraphQL APIs
- Edit the URL in the nav bar to connect to any GraphQL API
- Support for multiple tabs: each has own schema configuration (url, headers), query, variables, etc.
- Resizable and configurable panels for everything (query, explorer, variables, headers, settings, etc.): extendable to allow plugins to add panels and switch to them
- Persists configuration, history, etc to localStorage to get a stateful user experience
- Embeddable: Exports components that can be used in any React App,
- Loads monaco-editor and web workers from CDNs to avoid any extra bundling step to include them
- CSS is added at runtime by beamwind so that its not necessary to bundle css
- Extendable:
- IDE state exported as collection of Recoil atoms for plugins to manipulate them and react to them as necessary
- Plugin API to provide custom panels and functionality,
- Can run expensive stuff on web workers and use-monaco gives a really easy API to register and use workers that use text files from monaco-editor
- Ideas for plugins:
- GraphQL faker: design schema in one panels and explore it in another
- Hasura: create panel to generate declarative metadata/migrations like tables, etc
- Response manipulation: Allow user to write custom code in a panel that can be run with the result of the response, (like lodash, etc or persisting)
- Could create CLI / plugin to read directory and get GraphQL documents and have them available for exploration
- @magiql/browser/render can be used by GraphQL servers as an alternative to GraphQL playground (usage shown below)
- Should be configurable with plugins and initial state of IDE
- Tech used:
- react
- recoil: state management tool
- beamwind: a collection of packages to compile Tailwind CSS like shorthand syntax into CSS at runtime
- use-monaco: wrapper around monaco-editor , handles loading from CDN and managing workers, exposes easier APIs to extend the editor

Usage for GraphQL server

`typescript
import {
getGraphQLParameters,
processRequest,
shouldRenderGraphiQL,
} from "graphql-helix";

import { renderBrowser } from "@magiql/browser/render";

const allowCors = (fn) => async (req, res) => {
// ... middleware to allow cors for development
return await fn(req, res);
};

export default allowCors(async (req, res) => {
const request = {
body: req.body,
headers: req.headers,
method: req.method,
query: req.query,
};

if (shouldRenderGraphiQL(request)) {
res.send(
/*
* returns HTML that you send from a server
*/
renderBrowser({
uri: "/api/graphql",
})
);
} else {
const { operationName, query, variables } = getGraphQLParameters(request);

const result = await processRequest({
operationName,
query,
variables,
request,
schema,
});

if (result.type === "RESPONSE") {
result.headers.forEach(({ name, value }) => res.setHeader(name, value));
res.status(result.status);
res.json(result.payload);
}
}
});
`

Usage in React App

`tsx
import GraphQLBrowser from "@magiql/browser";
export default function App() {
return (
initialSchemaConfig={{
// whichever GraphQL endpoint you want to connect to,
// to access Next JS API Routes, we need the full url
uri: window.location.origin + "/api/graphql",
}}
/>
);
}
`

Usage in server-rendered React App

As the tool is web-based, in case your app is server-rendered, use the following to skip rendering the IDE on the server

`tsx
import GraphQLBrowser from "@magiql/browser";
export default function App() {
return typeof window !== "undefined" ? (
initialSchemaConfig={{
uri: window.location.origin + "/api/graphql",
}}
/>
) : (
<>
);
}
``