graphql-tag-printed

Same development experience as graphql-tag/loader but produces GQL queries as strings instead of ASTs

What

This is a GraphQL .gql and .graphql webpack loader that uses graphql-tag/loader under the hood but with a twist.

Instead of producing ASTs which can be very expensive to parse in runtime

Why

We were using Magento GraphQL API which has it's own AST parser, meaning we have no real benefit of sending ASTs to the wire so we ended up printing them to strings before sending queries through the network. This causes an overhead of transforming each AST to a string which isn't ideal for some performance metrics like FID. And overall it can add up with APIs that not support query batching with too many queries.

This loader solves this by moving the printing logic to build-time instead of run-time. Saving some kilobytes in some cases and parse time.

This is useful if you are using non-JS based GraphQL server and would like to get the same benefits that you would have with graphql-tag, like using .gql files and GQL fragments.

Getting Started

Install using yarn or npm

yarn add graphql-tag-printed --dev
 
# or 
 
npm install graphql-tag-printed --dev

In your webpack config, add the following rule:

{
  test: /\.(graphql|gql)$/,
  exclude: /node_modules/,
  loader: 'graphql-tag-printed',
}

Now you can import .gql files directly in your app files, any imported queries will be stringified and will include any fragments defined as well.

License

MIT