movio / bramble

A federated GraphQL API gateway

Full documentation

Bramble is a production-ready GraphQL federation gateway. It is built to be a simple, reliable and scalable way to aggregate GraphQL services together.

Features

Bramble supports:

• Shared types across services
• Namespaces
• Field-level permissions
• Plugins:
  • JWT, CORS, ...
  • Or add your own
• Hot reloading of configuration

It is also stateless and scales very easily.

Future work/not currently supported

There is currently no support for:

• Subscriptions
• Shared unions, interfaces, scalars, enums or inputs across services

Check FAQ for details: https://movio.github.io/bramble/#/federation?id=restriction-on-subscription

Contributing

Contributions are always welcome!

If you wish to contribute please open a pull request. Please make sure to:

• include a brief description or link to the relevant issue
• (if applicable) add tests for the behaviour you're adding/modifying
• commit messages are descriptive

Before making a significant change we recommend opening an issue to discuss the issue you're facing and the proposed solution.

Building and testing

Prerequisite: Go 1.17 or newer

To build the bramble command:

go build -o bramble ./cmd/bramble
./bramble -conf config.json

To run the tests:

go test ./...

Running locally

There is a docker-compose file that will run bramble and three example services.

docker-compose up

The gateway will then be hosted on http://localhost:8082/query, be sure to point a GraphQL client to this address.

{
  randomFoo {
    nodejs
    graphGophers
    gqlgen
  }
}

Comparison with other projects

• Apollo Server

  While Apollo Server is a popular tool we felt is was not the right tool for us as:

  • the federation specification is more complex than necessary
  • it is written in NodeJS where we favour Go

• Nautilus

  Nautilus provided a lot of inspiration for Bramble.

  Although the approach to federation was initially similar, Bramble now uses a different approach and supports for a few more things: fine-grained permissions, namespaces, easy plugin configuration, configuration hot-reloading...

  Bramble is also a central piece of software for Movio products and thus is actively maintained and developed.