Built-in plugins

Plugins extend Apollo Server's functionality by performing custom operations in response to certain events. These events correspond to individual phases of the GraphQL request lifecycle, and to the lifecycle of Apollo Server itself.

Certain Apollo Server features are provided as built-in plugins that are exported from within the @apollo/server package. Apollo Server installs certain plugins automatically, but you can also install them manually to override their default settings. See each plugin's documentation for details.

You can also create custom plugins.

List of built-in plugins

Name	Description	Location
Usage reporting	Gathers helpful operation usage data and reports it to GraphOS for visualization, alerting, and more.	`@apollo/server/plugin/usageReporting`
Schema reporting	Automatically reports the server's schema to GraphOS on startup to enable schema history and up-to-date metrics.	`@apollo/server/plugin/schemaReporting`
Inline trace	Used primarily by federated subgraphs to include operation trace data in responses to the gateway.	`@apollo/server/plugin/inlineTrace`
Cache control	Calculates caching behavior for operation responses.	`@apollo/server/plugin/cacheControl`
Landing page (multiple)	Handle displaying a default or custom landing page at Apollo Server's base URL.	`@apollo/server/plugin/landingPage/default`
Draining an HTTP server	Used to ensure your Node.js servers gracefully shut down.	`@apollo/server/plugin/drainHttpServer`
Enable federated subscriptions	Enables your server to handle federated subscription requests from Apollo Router via the callback protocol.	`@apollo/server/plugin/subscriptionCallback`

Installing plugins

You can install a plugin that isn't installed by default (or customize a default plugin) by providing a plugins configuration option to the ApolloServer constructor, like so:

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import { ApolloServer } from "@apollo/server";
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import { ApolloServerPluginUsageReporting } from '@apollo/server/plugin/usageReporting';
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const server = new ApolloServer({
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  typeDefs,
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  resolvers,
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  plugins: [
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    // Sets a non-default option on the usage reporting plugin
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    ApolloServerPluginUsageReporting({
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      sendVariableValues: { all: true },
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    }),
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  ],
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});

expressMiddleware

Usage reporting