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GraphQL Golden Path

The GraphQL Golden Path outlines an opinionated set of practices believed to give GraphQL adopters the greatest chance of success with the technology when made part of the default experience.

Since the Golden Path is about defining the default experience of GraphQL adopters, the audience for this resource is primarily not those adopters themselves, but instead developers writing the shared tooling that adopters will rely on. This audience is typically made up of open source and proprietary software maintainers writing GraphQL libraries, frameworks, and tooling (servers, clients, gateways, code generators, etc.), and the people designing schemas who need to ensure this core functionality is exposed in a compatible way. To a lesser extent, this resource also serves as a shared vendor-neutral reference to these solutions, explaining why they exist and how to use them.

The Golden Path is a community-maintained resource, led by the GraphQL Technical Steering Committee, and is likely to evolve over time. It is motivated by problems that users face while using GraphQL, and aims to reduce these problems for future users. Sometimes this involves changes to the GraphQL specification itself, but typically it involves aligning the ecosystem on a set of practices that minimize downsides for application developers by default (without requiring them to read large amounts of documentation).

Model​

The content is organized around four concepts:

  • Roles: entry points that map the reader's role to relevant practices.
  • Practices: default behaviors that should be adopted, one way or another.
  • Solutions: concrete implementation approaches for one or more practices.
  • Problems: failure modes these practices and solutions are intended to mitigate.

In short: determine the role (or roles) that best describe you as the reader and implement the specified practices by picking and applying one or more solutions for that role.

Get started​

The practices you need to implement will differ depending on your role; start by picking the roles that best reflect you or your project. You will also find terminology definitions on that page.

Status​

This site is a work in progress and not official. Guidance may be incomplete or incorrect.

References​