Apollo Router Changelogs

🐛 Fixes

Enforce feature restrictions for warning-state licenses

The router now enforces license restrictions even when a license is in a warning state. Previously, warning-state licenses could bypass enforcement for restricted features.

If your deployment uses restricted features, the router returns an error instead of continuing to run.

🧪 Experimental

Add experimental_hoist_orphan_errors to control orphan error path assignment

The GraphQL specification requires that errors include a path pointing to the most specific field where the error occurred. When a subgraph returns entity errors without valid paths, the router's default behavior is its closest attempt at spec compliance: it assigns each error to every matching entity path in the response. This is the correct behavior when subgraphs respond correctly.

However, when a subgraph returns a large number of entity errors without valid paths — for example, 2000 errors for 2000 expected entities — this causes a multiplicative explosion in the error array that can lead to significant memory pressure and out-of-memory kills. The root cause is the subgraph: a spec-compliant subgraph includes correct paths on its entity errors, and fixing the subgraph is the right long-term solution.

The new experimental_hoist_orphan_errors configuration provides an important mitigation while you work toward that fix. When enabled, the router assigns each orphaned error to the nearest non-array ancestor path instead of duplicating it across every entity. This trades spec-precise path assignment for substantially reduced error volume in the response — a conscious trade-off, not a strict improvement.

To target a specific subgraph:

experimental_hoist_orphan_errors:
  subgraphs:
    my_subgraph:
      enabled: true

To target all subgraphs:

experimental_hoist_orphan_errors:
  all:
    enabled: true

To target all subgraphs except one:

experimental_hoist_orphan_errors:
  all:
    enabled: true
  subgraphs:
    noisy_one:
      enabled: false

Per-subgraph settings override all. Note that this feature reduces the number of propagated errors but doesn't impose a hard cap — if your subgraph returns an extremely large number of errors, the router still processes all of them.

You'll likely know if you need this. Use it sparingly, and enable it only if you're affected and have been advised to do so. The behavior of this option is expected to change in a future release.

For full configuration reference and additional examples, see the experimental_hoist_orphan_errors documentation.