Introducing GraphQL Mesh v1 and Hive Gateway v1

Arda Tanrikulu
graphqlgraphql meshgraphql hivegraphql federation

We, The Guild, are proud to announce both the Version 1 release of GraphQL Mesh and Hive Gateway, and we believe this release brings a new perspective to GraphQL Federation that we call “Query Anything, Run Anywhere”.

After several years of experience with composed APIs with early v0 versions of GraphQL Mesh and Schema Stitching, we have completely rebuild GraphQL Mesh from scratch for GraphQL Federation.

TL;DR: The previous GraphQL Mesh is now split into two complimentary projects:

  • GraphQL Mesh: Compose and Transform Datasources into a Federated GraphQL Schema. Query anything anywhere. Get started with GraphQL Mesh
  • Hive Gateway: Our Federation Gateway for that integrates with GraphQL Mesh and Schema registries such as GraphQL Hive or Apollo Studio. Get started with Hive Gateway

What is Hive Gateway?

Hive Gateway is our fully open source and MIT-licensed GraphQL Gateway with native support for GraphQL Federation.

It is designed to fully integrate with with our GraphQL Hive Platform offering, but also neatly integrates with other Schema Registries such as Apollo Studio.

Hive Gateway is built on top of our existing and widely used open-source packages such as GraphQL Yoga and GraphQL Tools.

With Hive Gateway adding these features is now a simple configuration change, no enterprise license is required!

We listened to the feedback of the companies using Version 0 of GraphQL Mesh, and decided that Hive Gateway should be as easy-to-use and be batteries-included by default. Many of our users are not as versed and deep within the JavaScript and npm eco-system. The new configuration is designed in a way to be approachable for users from all backgrounds.

Getting started is easy, whether you’re already using the Hive Schema Registry, Apollo GraphOS, or local subgraphs. With just a few lines of configuration, you’ll end up with a running Gateway in no time.

How well does Hive Gateway support GraphQL Federation?

We put in a lot of effort over the last year into having a Federation compatibility test suite. We rebuilt our Federation Query Planner and Execution Engine completely from scratch from these learnings and now open-sources the test suite so other Apollo Federation Gateways can too benefit from our research as well. It already helped to discover and report some regressions in Apollo Router to the Apollo Team. We hope that this test suite will overall enhance the quality of all the GraphQL gateways on the market.

Do I have to use the Hive Registry?

No. You can gradually migrate to the Hive platform if desired. If you want to use your existing schema registry (e.g. GraphOS), Hive Gateway supports these registries as well. You don’t have to migrate to the Hive Platform if you are just looking for a replacement to Apollo Router or Apollo Gateway.

Deploy and Run Anywhere

Hive Gateway can run anywhere. No need to mess with JavaScript and Node.js. You can choose your preferred way:

  • Single Executable Binary
  • Docker Image
  • NPM package
  • If you are a JavaScript Tinkerer
    • Node.js, Bun, or Deno
    • Cloudflare Workers, AWS Lambda, Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions.
    • Integrate with your existing server framework such as Express, Fastify, Hapi and Koa.

What about GraphQL Mesh?

Previously what is now known as Hive Gateway has been one of the many building block of GraphQL Mesh. The other significant building block of GraphQL Mesh is the possibility to convert and compose any amount of APIs such as REST/OpenAPI, SOAP, gRPC or even a database like MySQL into a single unified GraphQL API, while applying a wide range of transforms e.g. for renaming or filtering the output API types.

A lot of our clients have been using this approach to transform legacy APIs and all kind of other sources for many years with great success.

From now on, GraphQL Mesh now only focuses only on composing datasources into a single annotated GraphQL/Supergraph SDL file that is 100% compatible with Apollo Federation.

Serving the composed GraphQL schema is now a concern of Hive Gateway, which seamlessly integrates with GraphQL Mesh.

All of the features introduced in GraphQL Mesh v0 remain unchanged. However, GraphQL Mesh now builds on top of the Apollo Federation specification. That means you do all the conversion, generation and stitching process at build time once, and then you generate a supergraph or subgraph SDL that can be consumed by any Apollo Federation compatible gateway.

To summarize, GraphQL Mesh is a framework that allows you to convert any API (REST, SOAP etc) into the Apollo Federation subgraph to be consumed by a gateway. For the best experience, we recommend using GraphQL Hive Gateway.

How can I migrate to v1?

While GraphQL Mesh v1 introduces several breaking changes, the core functionality remain the same as in v0. All transforms, plugins, and other features are still available through the combination of GraphQL Mesh and Hive Gateway. Simply follow our migration guides to make the transition. And as always, feel free to reach out to us directly for assistance.

However, there’s no need to rush your migration — we will continue to maintain v0 for the foreseeable future.

What is the relationship between GraphQL Mesh and Hive Gateway?

GraphQL Mesh generates a GraphQL Federation subgraph from a non GraphQL source (OpenAPI, SOAP, gRPC etc) and/or a GraphQL API that doesn’t have federation metadata. Then you can either compose that subgraph with Mesh, or publish it to the schema registry, or compose it using other tools like Apollo Rover to get a Federation Supergraph. Then this generated supergraph is consumed by a GraphQL Gateway like Hive Gateway.

Query Anything, Run Anywhere

As our initial motto from the earlier stages of GraphQL Mesh. We still follow it.

This time we combined this idea with Apollo Federation. GraphQL Mesh now federates non GraphQL and GraphQL sources on top of the official Apollo Federation specification.

Hive Gateway is there to orchestrate calls to those APIs and serve the responses to the client. You can use them together or take one of them and use with other alternatives.

Both are free, open-source, MIT-licensed, without the need to pay extra for enterprise grade features.

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