Due to their unrestricted nature, directives are one of GraphQL's more powerful features, enabling GraphQL servers to provide custom capabilities

Exploring GraphQL Directives in the Wild

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2021-06-04 23:00:08

Due to their unrestricted nature, directives are one of GraphQL's more powerful features, enabling GraphQL servers to provide custom capabilities not supported by the GraphQL spec, and offering a glimpse of what GraphQL may look like in the future.

Directives are suitable for those generic functionalities that can be applied across several parts of the application, such as:

Some time ago, I wrote article GraphQL directives are underrated, expressing how we can benefit from directives. In this write-up I expand on the topic, attempting to find out what actual directives are out there, available to our use.

I will do a discovery tour of directives in the wild, as offered by different GraphQL servers, tools and services, and including both schema-type directives (used to help build the GraphQL schema) and query-type directives (used to alter the response when resolving the query).

@specifiedBy has been added to the spec very recently, so not all GraphQL servers support it yet. It is used to provide a specification URL for declaring how custom scalar types behave.