External Composition

⚠️

Only available for Federation projects.

The process of running the self-host version with External Composition is similar to the process of running it with Hive Cloud version - you’ll need to run the external composition service. The difference is that you’ll be able to run it locally, instead of running it on a publicly available service.

We provide a Docker image for running external composition service for Apollo Federation v2.

The pre-built image implements the best-practice to secure your endpoint, and uses the latest version of Apollo Federation v2.

For self-hosting we recommend adding the external composition federation container configuration to your docker-compose.community.yml:

docker-compose.community.yml

services:
  # ... other services
  external-composition:
    image: '${DOCKER_REGISTRY}composition-federation-2${DOCKER_TAG}'
    networks:
      - 'stack'
    healthcheck:
      test: ['CMD', 'wget', '--spider', '-q', 'localhost:3069/_readiness']
      interval: 5s
      timeout: 5s
      retries: 6
      start_period: 5s
    ports:
      - 3069:3069
    environment:
      PORT: 3069
      SECRET: '${EXTERNAL_COMPOSITION_SECRET}'

Make sure to set the EXTERNAL_COMPOSITION_SECRET environment variable to a secure value.

Secure external composition secret example

export EXTERNAL_COMPOSITION_SECRET=$(openssl rand -hex 16)

After that and restarting your stack, you can use the external composition service by adding it to an existing project in the Settings.

Since the Hive server is using the internal docker network, you need to use the service name as the hostname http://composition-federation-2:3069/compose. Also, make sure to use the correct secret.

External Composition Federation 2

Troubleshooting