Using Rover for Connectors Development
Use Apollo's Rover CLI in your Connector development workflow
Rover is Apollo's command-line interface for developing graphs with Apollo GraphOS. It serves as a primary tool for developers working with GraphQL schemas, including Connector-based development workflows. This guide provides an overview of how to use Rover when developing with Apollo Connectors.
Installation
The Rover CLI is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. To install or upgrade to the latest release of Rover:
curl -sSL https://rover.apollo.dev/nix/latest | sh See more installation methods.
Verifying installation with rover --version
After installation, you can verify Rover is correctly installed by running rover --version in your terminal, which will display the current version number.
For full use of all Connectors-related features, install v0.29.0 or later.
Authentication with GraphOS using rover config auth
Before using Rover with GraphOS, you need to authenticate with GraphOS by running rover config auth.
This interactive command guides you through obtaining and configuring your API key for GraphOS.
Graph initialization
The rover init command creates a new graph in your current directory.
When prompted by the command, select the Start with REST APIs to set up a graph with all the necessary files for Connector development.
Connector development
The rover dev command runs a local instance of the GraphOS Router that can process your Connectors schemas.
This local environment lets you test your Connectors without deploying to production.
The dev command supports hot-reloading, automatically detecting changes to your Connector schema files and updating the running router.
dev works with schemas that include Connectors, ensure you include APOLLO_KEY and APOLLO_GRAPH_REF environment variables.Testing Connectors
When running rover dev, you can access Apollo Sandbox at localhost:4000 to interactively test your Connector functionality.
This Sandbox lets you to test requests and see real-time responses from your REST API integrations.
Schema publishing
Use rover subgraph publish to publish schemas to GraphOS. This makes your Connectors available in your graph for client usage.
CI/CD integration
Rover can be integrated into continuous integration and deployment pipelines to automate Connector schema validation and publishing. The Rover docs provide specific integration guidance for GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Bitbucket Pipelines, and other popular CI systems.