Schema registration via schema reporting

Schema reporting enables your GraphQL server to register its latest schema with Apollo every time it starts up. To use this feature, your server needs to support the schema reporting protocol. This protocol is supported by Apollo Server, and other GraphQL servers can implement support.

Schema reporting does not currently support graphs that use Apollo Federation. If you have a federated graph, instead see Setting up managed federation.

Apollo Server setup

Schema reporting is available in Apollo Server version 2.15 and later. To enable it:

1. Obtain an API key for your graph:

   How to obtain a graph API key

2. Set this API key as the value of the APOLLO_KEY environment variable in your server's environment, and also set the APOLLO_SCHEMA_REPORTING environment variable to true.

   If you're using the dotenv library, you can add these definitions to the .env file in your project's root directory, like so:

   .env
   Copy

   APOLLO_KEY=YOUR_KEY_HEREAPOLLO_GRAPH_ID=your-graph-idAPOLLO_SCHEMA_REPORTING=true

   Important: If you use a .env file, do not commit it to version control. Always use .gitignore or a similar method to omit files that include secret credentials.

   You can alternatively provide these values to Apollo Server via the apollo constructor option, but again, do not add secret credentials to your application source.

Now every time your server finishes starting up, it waits a random amount of time between zero and ten seconds before automatically registering its schema (you can customize this time range).

Registering to a variant with schema reporting

Your server can register its schema to a particular variant of your graph. Each of your server's environments (development, staging, production, etc.) should register to a different variant.

To do so with Apollo Server, set the APOLLO_GRAPH_VARIANT environment variable in each server environment:

APOLLO_KEY=YOUR_KEY_HERE
APOLLO_GRAPH_ID=your-graph-id
APOLLO_GRAPH_VARIANT=staging
APOLLO_SCHEMA_REPORTING=true

If you don't specify a variant, Apollo Server reports its schema to the default variant (named current).

Providing runtime metadata (recommended)

The schema reporting protocol accepts optional values that help both you and Apollo associate each request with a particular server instance and platform. This in turn helps with diagnosing issues and improving performance.

To provide these values to Apollo Server, set the following environment variables in your server's environment:

Customizing schema reporting behavior in Apollo Server

Apollo Server supports schema reporting via a plugin called ApolloServerPluginSchemaReporting. When you set the APOLLO_SCHEMA_REPORTING environment variable to true, Apollo Server automatically installs this plugin with its default configuration.

If you need to configure the plugin further, you can explicitly install the plugin in your server. For example, you can tweak the amount of time that Apollo Server waits on startup before attempting to register its schema, or you can override the actual schema string that is registered. For details, see the schema reporting plugin reference.

Other GraphQL servers

Any GraphQL server can (and is encouraged to!) support automatic schema registration by implementing the Schema reporting protocol.

Currently, we are not aware of GraphQL server libraries besides Apollo Server that implement the schema reporting protocol. If you add support to an open-source library, please let us know at support@apollographql.com!

Rolling deploys with schema reporting

Whenever you perform a rolling deployment of a schema update, different active instances of your server might temporarily report different schemas to Apollo. If this occurs, Apollo uses the following algorithm to choose which schema to register:

Using this algorithm, your updated schema is registered within a few minutes after your rolling deployment completes.