Best Practices

Use contract variants to control AI access to graphs

GraphOS contract variants let you deliver different subsets of your graph to different consumers.

When running Apollo MCP Server with GraphOS, use contract variants whenever possible. This allows you to control which parts of your graph are accessible to AI by exposing only the necessary subsets.

In particular, we strongly recommend contract variants when using:

• GraphOS-managed persisted queries

• Introspection

Send client name header when using persisted queries

If you register a persisted query with a specific client name instead of null, you must configure the MCP Server to send the necessary header indicating the client name to the router.

Use the --header option when running the MCP Server to pass the header to the router. The default name of the header expected by the router is apollographql-client-name. To use a different header name, configure telemetry.apollo.client_name_header in router YAML configuration.