GraphQL Mesh is a GraphQL Federation framework and gateway for both GraphQL Federation and non-GraphQL Federation subgraphs, non-GraphQL services, such as REST and gRPC, and also databases such as MongoDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL.
GraphQL Mesh allows you to use GraphQL query language to access data in remote APIs that don't run GraphQL (and also ones that do run GraphQL). It can be used as a gateway to other services or run as a local GraphQL schema that aggregates data from remote APIs.
The goal of GraphQL Mesh is to let developers easily access services that are written in other APIs specs (such as gRPC, OpenAPI/Swagger, OData, SOAP/WSDL, Apache Thrift, Mongoose, PostgreSQL, Neo4j, and also GraphQL) with GraphQL queries and mutations.
GraphQL Mesh gives the developer the ability to modify the output schemas, link types across schemas and merge schema types. You can even add custom GraphQL types and resolvers that fit your needs.
It allows developers to control the way they fetch data, and overcome issues related to backend implementation, legacy API services, chosen schema specification and non-typed APIs.
GraphQL Mesh is acting as a proxy to your data, and uses common libraries to wrap your existing API services. You can use this proxy locally in your service or application by running the GraphQL schema locally (with GraphQL execute), or you can deploy this as a gateway layer to your internal service.
How does it work?
The way GraphQL Mesh works is:
- Collect API schema specifications from services
- Create a runtime instance of fully-typed SDK for the services.
- Convert API specs to GraphQL schema
- Applies custom schema transformations and schema extensions
- Creates a Federation subgraph or a Federation-compatible supergraph