graphql-tag

A JavaScript template literal tag that parses GraphQL queries into the standard GraphQL AST.

import gql from 'graphql-tag';

const query = gql`
  {
    user(id: 5) {
      firstName
      lastName
    }
  }
`

// query is now a GraphQL syntax tree object
console.log(query);

// {
//   "kind": "Document",
//   "definitions": [
//     {
//       "kind": "OperationDefinition",
//       "operation": "query",
//       "name": null,
//       "variableDefinitions": null,
//       "directives": [],
//       "selectionSet": {
//         "kind": "SelectionSet",
//         "selections": [
//           {
//             "kind": "Field",
//             "alias": null,
//             "name": {
//               "kind": "Name",
//               "value": "user",
//               ...

You can easily explore GraphQL ASTs on astexplorer.net.

This package is the way to pass queries into Apollo Client. If you're building a GraphQL client, you can use it too!

Why use this?

GraphQL strings are the right way to write queries in your code, because they can be statically analyzed using tools like eslint-plugin-graphql. However, strings are inconvenient to manipulate, if you are trying to do things like add extra fields, merge multiple queries together, or other interesting stuff.

That's where this package comes in - it lets you write your queries with ES2015 template literals and compile them into an AST with the gql tag.

Caching parse results

This package only has one feature - it caches previous parse results in a simple dictionary. This means that if you call the tag on the same query multiple times, it doesn't waste time parsing it again. It also means you can use === to compare queries to check if they are identical.