Gateway

Creating gateways

One of the core parts of Quick is the gateway. As the GraphQL interface, it holds the schema describing your data and lets you query it.

The first step when working with gateways is to create a new one:

quick gateway create example

The example parameter defines the name of your gateway. Since you can have many gateways, you will need the name when applying a new schema or querying data from it.

It will take a couple of seconds before the gateway is ready. You can run quick gateway describe example to check the gateway's status. It should output:

Name: example
Replicas: 1
Tag: 0.9.0-dev

The GraphQL schema

After the gateway finished starting, you can apply your first schema. This guide uses an e-commerce application as an example. You can start with a basic schema like this:

schema.gql

type Query {
    findPurchase(purchaseId: String): Purchase 
}

type Purchase {
    purchaseId: String!
    productId: Int!
    userId: Int!
    amount: Int
    price: Price
}

type Product {
    productId: Int!
    name: String
    description: String
    price: Price
}

type Price {
    total: Float
    currency: String
}

The central type is Purchase, describing a user buying a product. It links the Product type through its field productId and a nested type Price.

The Query type is special in GraphQL since it's a root type that functions as an entry point. The schema defines a query field findPurchase, that takes a purchaseId and returns a Purchase. As you may have noticed, some fields have a trailing exclamation mark: Those fields aren't nullable.

Attention

Every GraphQL schema requires the Query type. The gateway won't parse the schema if you don't specify it. In case you don't need or want one, you can use an empty query: type Query {}.

Applying a schema

With the GraphQL schema being ready, you can apply it to the created gateway:

quick gateway apply example -f schema.gql

The example parameter is the name of the newly created gateway that you can reference like this. The -f flag lets you pass the GraphQL schema to the command.

Accessing the gateway

You can connect to the GraphQL API of the gateway with the address $QUICK_URL/gateway/example/graphql, where example is the name of the gateway you created earlier. The gateway requires the QUICK_API_KEY to be set in the header X-API-Key.

You can now use gql to see whether the gateway has the correct schema:

gql-cli "$QUICK_URL/gateway/example/graphql" \
  -H "X-API-Key:$QUICK_API_KEY" \
  --print-schema

Among some other types, the schema as defined earlier should be visible.