README.md

@magiql/browser

Web-based Browser and IDE for GraphQL APIs, built on monaco-editor and recoil

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

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

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

import GraphQLBrowser from "@magiql/browser";
export default function App() {
  return (
    <GraphQLBrowser
      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

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