Develop supergraph locally with new dev command in Hive CLI

When developing a Supergraph, you may want to test your local subgraph or subgraphs against the rest of the GraphQL schema.

This is now possible with the new dev command in the Hive CLI (only available for Federation projects).

hive dev --service reviews --url http://localhost:3001/graphql

This command allows you to replace the subgraph(s) available in the Registry with your local subgraph(s) and compose a Supergraph.

The result of executing this command is a file containing the Supergraph SDL, which can be feed into the gateway of choice.

Rather than uploading your local schema to the registry and retrieving the supergraph from the CDN, you can integrate your local modifications directly into the supergraph. This speeds up the whole process of developing and testing your subgraph.

Usage

Let’s say you have two subgraphs, reviews and products, and you want to test the reviews service.

First, you need to start the reviews service locally and then run the following command:

hive dev --watch --service reviews --url http://localhost:3001/graphql

This command will fetch subgraph’s schema from the provided URL, replace the original reviews subgraph from the Registry with the local one, and compose a supergraph. The outcome will be saved in the supergraph.graphql file.

The products subgraph will stay untoched, meaing that the gateway will route requests to its remote endpoint.

The --watch flag will keep the process running and update the supergraph whenever the local schema changes.

Now you’re ready to use the supergraph.graphql file in your gateway and execute queries.

Other examples

# Introspect the SDL of the local service
hive dev --service reviews --url http://localhost:3001/graphql
 
# Watch mode
hive dev --service reviews --url http://localhost:3001/graphql --watch
 
# Provide the SDL of the local service
hive dev --service reviews --url http://localhost:3001/graphql --schema reviews.graphql
 
# Multiple services
hive dev \
  --service reviews --url http://localhost:3001/graphql \
  --service products --url http://localhost:3002/graphql --schema products.graphql
 
# Custom output file (default: supergraph.graphql)
hive dev --service reviews --url http://localhost:3001/graphql --write super.graphql