10 Popular Open-Source GraphQL Projects and Tools You Have To Try

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SinceGraphQL was open-sourced in 2015, it has been gaining popularity and adoption from the developer community, with developers looking for awesome ways to build stuff with and for GraphQL.

If you are trying your hand at GraphQL, building a new project, or looking for cool ways developers build for GraphQL. By leveraging open-source GraphQL projects and implementing GraphQL tools in your projects, you can understand GraphQL best practices, techniques, and proper ways to set up GraphQL in production, which can improve and accelerate your GraphQL development experience. In this article, we’ve compiled a list of the top open-source GraphQL projects and tools based on their stars on GitHub. Our list contains a mix of GraphQL integrated development environments (IDEs), clients, and servers to help you explore the GraphQL metaverse.

Top 3 GraphQL IDEs

GraphQL integrated development environments (IDEs) are software applications that combine common developer tools into a single graphical user interface (GUI) for viewing, writing, and running GraphQL operations.

What: GraphiQL is a popular and lightweight in-browser IDE for exploring GraphQL APIs. It was created by the same Facebook team that created the GraphQL spec and released alongside in 2015.

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What: GraphQL Playground is a popular IDE for exploring GraphQL APIs. It was created by Prisma and built on top of GraphiQL.

Features:

• GraphQL Playground provides more intuitive API documentation, schema exploration, and GraphQL query debugging experience than GraphiQL with a much nicer UI. These features improve development workflows by writing, validating, and running GraphQL queries much smoother.
• GraphQL Playground features automatic in-session schema reload, which helps avoid schema changes and breakdown during query sessions.
• With GraphQL Playground, you can share your GraphQL Playground with other developers using the GraphQL share bin option. This can help when collaborating on projects with team members.

Why we think you should try it out:

What: GraphQL Editor is an IDE for creating and understanding GraphQL schemas by using a visual blocks system. GraphQL Editor makes understanding GraphQL schemas a lot easier.

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Top 3 GraphQL Clients

GraphQL clients are software libraries/frameworks that interface with a GraphQL server/API data. GraphQL clients handle sending queries and mutations to a GraphQL API while abstracting lower-level networking details or maintaining a local cache.

What: Apollo Client is a comprehensive GraphQL client that enables you to manage local and remote data from GraphQL APIs.

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What: Relay is a JavaScript framework developed by Facebook for managing and fetching data from GraphQL APIs in React applications.

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What: URQL is a lightweight, extensible GraphQL client. It is built to be highly customizable and versatile and exposes a set of helpers for several frameworks (React, Vue, Svelte).

Features:

• Caching in URQL is fully customizable through the exchanges. It supports “Document Caching” for content-heavy pages and “Normalized Caching” for dynamic and data-heavy applications. This allows you to easily set up caching on your client applications based on your specific requirements.
• URQL has first-class support for functionality such as offline mode, file uploads, authentication, and Next.js. This support means you spend less time implementing features such as authentication in your client application.
• URQL provides an extensibility mechanism that allows app developers to scale and customize the URQL GraphQL library to suit their needs.

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Top 3 Custom GraphQL Servers

GraphQL servers expose your data as a GraphQL API that your client applications can query. GraphQL servers do the heavy lifting of ensuring that the proper quantity of data is retrieved using the fewest possible database lookups and API calls. In this list, we will look at different ways to write a custom GraphQL server from scratch.

What: Apollo Server is an open-source, GraphQL server used to build and run GraphQL APIs on Node.js. With Apollo server, you define the GraphQL schema design, and Apollo server takes care of the mechanics of the GraphQL API.

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What: The Express GraphQL module from Express provides a simple way to create a GraphQL server in Node.js. With Express GraphQL, you can create a GraphQL HTTP server with any HTTP web framework that supports connect-styled middleware, including Connect itself, Express, and Restify.

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What: Hot Chocolate is an open-source GraphQL server used to create GraphQL APIs for the Microsoft .NET platform. It is fully compliant with the newest GraphQL spec and compatible with all GraphQL compliant clients, such as Relay and Apollo Client.

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Get Instant GraphQL APIs on All Your Data With Hasura

Hasura GraphQL Engine is a GraphQL server that gives you real-time, instant GraphQL APIs over your database. Hasura makes it easy to build your backend GraphQL app or add a GraphQL layer to your existing application.

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Your GraphQL Project or Tool Could Be Next

Many of these GraphQL projects and tools began as niche developments and are now being used by top companies like Optum, Shopify, and Netflix. For example, the URQL GraphQL client, launched in 2019 to provide a lightweight, intuitive alternative to GraphQL clients like Relay and Apollo, now has over 100 thousand weekly downloads on npm. The GraphQL developer community is growing, and your GraphQL project could be the next one to take center stage.

You can also join the fantastic GraphQL developer community by applying to become a contributor to a GraphQL project or tool. Many GraphQL projects and tools depend on contributors to maintain and develop new features and plugins.

If you’re working on an open-source GraphQL tool or project or know any awesome ones we should check out, reach out and let us know on Twitter or Discord, and we’ll take a look!

Originally published at https://hasura.io on December 14, 2021.