Overview

Now that we've seen what the full managed federation workflow looks like, it's time to pick up where we left off with FlyBy. We have our locations and reviews subgraphs in place, so the next steps are to create a supergraph in Apollo Studio and publish our subgraphs!

In this lesson, we will:

• Create a supergraph for FlyBy in Apollo Studio
• Use the Rover CLI to register our subgraph schemas with the Apollo schema registry
• Review the supergraph schema generated by the schema registry

✏️ Creating a graph in Apollo Studio

Let's start by spinning up a new supergraph for FlyBy.

1. Open a new browser window and go to Apollo Studio.

2. If you haven't created a graph in Apollo Studio before now, you'll be prompted to do so. Otherwise, we can create a new graph by clicking the + Create New Graph button in the upper right corner of the dashboard.

   studio.apollographql.com

   

3. We'll give our graph a descriptive title, keep the default settings for Graph Architecture as "Supergraph", then click Next.

   studio.apollographql.com

   

   If you don't see the modal above, you may be on the wrong plan.

   Check your plan: Part of this course covers the self-hosted router, which requires a GraphOS Enterprise plan. You can still follow along if your organization is on a different plan, but you won’t be able to complete certain hands-on tasks. You can also test out this functionality by signing up for a free Enterprise trial.

4. We should now see a modal with options for publishing a schema. We'll get to that in a moment.

   studio.apollographql.com

   

✏️ Storing Apollo environment variables

To publish our subgraphs using Rover, we'll need to save two environment variables from Apollo Studio:

• APOLLO_KEY: An API key for authenticating Rover. It starts with something like service:your-graph-name.
• APOLLO_GRAPH_REF: The graph reference (or graph ref) for our supergraph, which we'll use to tell Rover where to publish our subgraphs.
  • A graph ref starts with the graph's ID, followed by an @ symbol, followed by the graph variant.

We can get the values for APOLLO_KEY and APOLLO_GRAPH_REF out of the publishing options modal in Studio.

1. Go back to the configuration options in Apollo Studio that appeared after you created your supergraph. Make sure you're on the Schema Document tab.

2. First, make sure that the Supergraph Pipeline Track dropdown is set to Federation 2 Supergraph. This specifies that our supergraph should be built using the latest features of Apollo Federation.

   studio.apollographql.com

   

3. Below, take a little peek at the command for publishing a subgraph schema. We'll be running this command shortly, but for now, we're more interested in the APOLLO_KEY environment variable here.

   APOLLO_KEY=your-graphs-apollo-key \ 
     rover subgraph publish your-graph-name@current \
     --name products --schema ./products-schema.graphql \
     --routing-url http://products.prod.svc.cluster.local:4001/graphql

4. Click on the eye icon on the code block to reveal the full value of APOLLO_KEY. Copy APOLLO_KEY and its value to your clipboard.

5. Back in our code editor, we'll create a new file in the router directory called .env.

6. Paste your APOLLO_KEY into router/.env.

   router/.env

   APOLLO_KEY=your-graphs-apollo-key

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7. Now let's go back to Studio to get our graph ref. The value we're looking for appears in the same code block, directly after the "rover subgraph publish" part of the command. We'll copy this value onto our clipboard.

   APOLLO_KEY=your-graphs-apollo-key \
     rover subgraph publish your-graph-name@current \ 
     --name products --schema ./products-schema.graphql \
     --routing-url http://products.prod.svc.cluster.local:4001/graphql

   Note: Our graph ref uses the current variant for our supergraph, which is the default variant. We'll talk more about variants in Voyage III: Federation in Production.

8. In your router/.env file, add a new line and set your APOLLO_GRAPH_REF environment variable:

   router/.env

   APOLLO_KEY=your-graphs-apollo-key
   APOLLO_GRAPH_REF=your-graph-name@current 

   Copy

We've got the values we need to publish our subgraphs, but we'll also need to set up the Rover CLI.

✏️ Installing the Rover CLI

1. If you haven't installed Rover yet, open a new terminal window and run the install command.

   curl -sSL https://rover.apollo.dev/nix/latest | sh

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   Note: If you want to install Rover using a different method, see the official Rover installation docs.

2. Verify that the installation completed successfully by running the rover command in the terminal. If it outputs a list of options and subcommands for using Rover, great! The CLI is installed and ready to go.

✏️ Authenticating Rover

Let's authenticate with Rover so that Studio knows we have permission to publish schemas to our supergraph.

1. In the terminal, run the following command:

   rover config auth

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2. You'll be prompted to enter the value of APOLLO_KEY, which you can find in your .env file. Paste it into the terminal (only the part after the APOLLO_KEY= piece), and press return. The terminal won't show the actual value when you paste it. It is a secret, after all!

3. You should see a message in the terminal output that says "Successfully saved API key", which means you've successfully authenticated Rover!

Onwards to publishing our subgraph schemas!

The rover subgraph publish command

Rover has a command ready to help us with this important task: rover subgraph publish. This command pushes the latest version of a single subgraph schema to Apollo Studio.

To use this command, we need the graph ref for the supergraph we want to publish to and the following command line options:

We'll fill in these options with the details for each of our subgraphs.

✏️ Publishing the locations subgraph

Let's see this command in action by publishing our locations subgraph.

1. Bounce back to the terminal and make sure we're in the root directory for the project.

2. Now let's type out the rover subgraph publish command:

   We'll paste in the value of our APOLLO_GRAPH_REF environment variable.

   For the name option, we'll pass in locations.

   For the schema option, we'll pass the relative path to our locations.graphql file.

   And for the routing-url option, we'll pass in localhost:4001.

   rover subgraph publish <APOLLO_GRAPH_REF> \
     --name locations \
     --schema ./subgraph-locations/locations.graphql \
     --routing-url http://localhost:4001

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   Note: We've used the \ character in this command to improve legibility by putting each command-line option on its own line. If you choose to type the entire rover subgraph publish command on a single line, you don't need to include the \.

3. If all is well in the world, running this command should output a message confirming that the subgraph has been published and the supergraph has been updated!

Checking the results in Apollo Studio

Let's go back to Studio and have a look at "See schema changes" to see what's changed in our supergraph.

This new page looks similar to the Sandbox we used in previous lessons, but with additional features for managing our supergraph.

Let's click on the Schema tab in the sidebar.

Schema Reference

The Schema Reference page lets us see all the types and fields in our composed supergraph schema. That's right, even though we've only published one subgraph so far, we already have a supergraph schema!

We see that our supergraph's Query type includes the two fields from the locations subgraph. Each field is annotated with its description, any variables it requires, and which subgraph it belongs to.

✏️ Publishing the reviews subgraph

Let's use rover subgraph publish again to publish the reviews subgraph and see how our schema changes.

1. Back in the terminal in the root of our project, we'll use the rover subgraph publish command again. We won't change our graph ref, but we'll update the other command line options to reflect the reviews subgraph:

   rover subgraph publish <APOLLO_GRAPH_REF> \
     --name reviews \
     --schema ./subgraph-reviews/reviews.graphql \
     --routing-url http://localhost:4002

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2. After it runs successfully, head back to Studio and refresh the Schema Reference page. Now we can see the new latestReviews field that our reviews subgraph added to the Query type!

   studio.apollographql.com

   

Nice job! With just a few commands, we've reached an important milestone on our federation journey. We've used managed federation to register our subgraphs to the schema registry, and Apollo Studio automatically composed our supergraph schema for us!

Reviewing our schemas

Let's take a closer look at that supergraph schema. Click on the SDL tab at the top of the Schema page. Here we can see details about our published subgraphs, along with two additional schemas.

The API schema is the GraphQL API that gets exposed to your clients. It cleanly and logically represents the combination of your subgraph schemas. (We won't worry about this schema for now.)

The Supergraph schema is used by the router like a map, to define how incoming GraphQL operations can be divided up among the underlying subgraphs. Let's investigate the Supergraph schema to get an idea of what Apollo Studio is doing for us behind the scenes.

Looks like the supergraph schema includes some new syntax and directives that we didn't create ourselves. We don't need to dive into these. But what's more interesting to us is seeing how the supergraph schema identifies the types and fields that belong to each one of our subgraphs.

Scroll down in the supergraph schema and take a look at the Query type. Here, the fields we added to the Query type in both subgraphs have been consolidated in one place. Each field is annotated with a special @join_field directive that references the name of its originating subgraph.

Our supergraph schema provides a complete picture for the router to query for information about locations, reviews, or any combination of the two! And as we learned in the previous lesson, Studio will automatically recompose this supergraph schema anytime we push a change to either one of our subgraphs.

Practice

Key takeaways

• We can use the rover subgraph publish command from the Rover CLI to publish our subgraph schemas to the Apollo schema registry.
• Whenever a new subgraph schema is published, Apollo Studio composes a new supergraph schema with any subgraphs registered to our supergraph.
• The supergraph schema consolidates all the types and fields across our published subgraphs. It also includes extra directives to help the router determine which subgraphs can resolve each field.

Up next

Our next task is to look at how the router uses the supergraph schema to resolve incoming GraphQL operations and bundle data from multiple subgraphs into one clean response.