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@graphiql/react

A React SDK for building integrated GraphQL developer experiences for the web.

Purpose

This package contains a set of building blocks that allow its users to build GraphQL IDEs with ease. It's the set of components that make up GraphiQL, the first and official GraphQL IDE, owned and maintained by the GraphQL Foundation.

There are two kinds of building blocks that this package provides: Stateful context providers for state management and simple UI components.

Getting started

All the state for your GraphQL IDE lives in multiple contexts. The easiest way to get started is by using the GraphiQLProvider component that renders all the individual providers.

There is one required prop called fetcher. This is a function that performs GraphQL request against a given endpoint. You can easily create a fetcher using the method createGraphiQLFetcher from the @graphiql/toolkit package.

import { GraphiQLProvider } from '@graphiql/react';
import { createGraphiQLFetcher } from '@graphiql/toolkit';

const fetcher = createGraphiQLFetcher({
  url: 'https://my.graphql.api/graphql',
});

function MyGraphQLIDE() {
  return (
    <GraphiQLProvider fetcher={fetcher}>
      <div className="graphiql-container">Hello GraphQL</div>
    </GraphiQLProvider>
  );
}

Inside the provider you can now use any UI component provided by @graphiql/react. For example, you can render a query editor like this:

import { QueryEditor } from '@graphiql/react';

function MyGraphQLIDE() {
  return (
    <GraphiQLProvider fetcher={fetcher}>
      <div className="graphiql-container">
        <QueryEditor />
      </div>
    </GraphiQLProvider>
  );
}

The package also ships the necessary CSS that all its UI components need. You can import them from @graphiql/react/dist/style.css.

Note: In order for these styles to apply, the UI components need to be rendered inside an element that has a class name graphiql-container.

By default, the UI components will try to use the Roboto font for regular text and the Fira Code font for mono-space text. If you want to use the default fonts you can load them using these files:

• @graphiql/react/font/roboto.css
• @graphiql/react/font/fira-code.css.

You can of course use any other method to load these fonts (for example loading them from Google Fonts).

Further details on how to use @graphiql/react can be found in the reference implementation of a GraphQL IDE - GraphiQL - in the graphiql package.

Available contexts

There are multiple contexts that own different parts of the state that make up a complete GraphQL IDE. For each context there is a provider component (<name>ContextProvider) that makes sure the context is initialized and managed properly. These components contains all the logic related to state management. In addition, for each context there is also a hook (use<name>Context) that allows you to consume its current value.

Here is a list of all contexts that come with @graphiql/react

• StorageContext: Provides a storage API that can be used to persist state in the browser (by default using localStorage)
• EditorContext: Manages all the editors and tabs
• SchemaContext: Fetches, validates and stores the GraphQL schema
• ExecutionContext: Executes GraphQL requests
• HistoryContext: Persists executed requests in storage
• ExplorerContext: Handles the state for the docs explorer

All context properties are documented using JSDoc comments. If you're using an IDE like VSCode for development these descriptions will show up in auto-complete tooltips. All these descriptions can also be found in the API Docs.

Theming

All the components from @graphiql/react have been designed with customization in mind. We achieve this using CSS variables.

All variables that are available for customization can be found in the root.css file.

Colors

Colors are defined using the HSL format. All CSS variables for colors are defined as a list of the three values that make up HSL (hue, saturation and lightness).

This approach allows @graphiql/react to use transparent colors by passing the value of the CSS variable in the hsla function. This enables us to provide truly reusable UI elements where good contrasts are preserved regardless of the elements background.

Development

If you want to develop with @graphiql/react locally - in particular when working on the graphiql package - all you need to do is run yarn dev in the package folder in a separate terminal. This will build the package using Vite. When using it in combination with yarn dev-graphiql (running in the repo root) this will give you auto-reloading when working on graphiql and @graphiql/react simultaneously.