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Introduction

Welcome to Ariadne!

This guide will introduce you to the basic concepts behind creating GraphQL APIs, and show how Ariadne helps you to implement them with just a little Python code.

At the end of this page you will have your own simple GraphQL API accessible through the browser, implementing a single field that returns a "Hello" message along with a client's user agent.

Make sure that you've installed Ariadne using pip install ariadne, and that you have your favorite code editor open and ready.

Defining schema

First, we will describe what data can be obtained from our API.

In Ariadne this is achieved by defining Python strings with content written in Schema Definition Language (SDL), a special language for declaring GraphQL schemas.

We will start by defining the special type Query that GraphQL services use as an entry point for all reading operations. Next, we will specify a single field, named hello, and define that it will return a value of type String, and that it will never return null.

Using the SDL, our Query type definition will look like this:

type_defs = """
    type Query {
        hello: String!
    }
"""

The type Query { } block declares the type, hello is the field definition, String is the return value type, and the exclamation mark following it means that the returned value will never be null.

Validating schema

Ariadne provides the gql utility function to validate schema. It takes a single argument (a GraphQL string) like the following example:

from ariadne import gql

type_defs = gql("""
    type Query {
        hello String!
    }
""")

gql validates the schema and raises a descriptive GraphQLSyntaxError, if there is an issue, or returns the original unmodified string if it is correct.

If we try to run the above code now, we will get an error pointing to incorrect syntax within our type_defs declaration:

graphql.error.syntax_error.GraphQLSyntaxError: Syntax Error: Expected :, found Name

GraphQL request (3:19)
    type Query {
        hello String!
              ^
    }

Using gql is optional; however, without it, the above error would occur during your server's initialization and point to somewhere inside Ariadne's GraphQL initialization logic, making tracking down the error tricky if your API is large and spread across many modules.

First resolver

The resolvers are functions mediating between API consumers and the application's business logic. In Ariadne every GraphQL type has fields, and every field has a resolver function that takes care of returning the value that the client has requested.

We want our API to greet clients with a "Hello (user agent)!" string. This means that the hello field has to have a resolver that somehow finds the client's user agent, and returns a greeting message from it.

At its simplest, a resolver is a function that returns a value:

def resolve_hello(*_):
    return "Hello..."  # What's next?

The above code is perfectly valid, with a minimal resolver meeting the requirements of our schema. It takes any arguments, does nothing with them and returns a blank greeting string.

Real-world resolvers are rarely that simple: they usually read data from some source such as a database, process inputs, or resolve value in the context of a parent object. How should our basic resolver look to resolve a client's user agent?

In Ariadne every field resolver is called with at least two arguments: the query's parent object, and the query's execution info that usually contains a context attribute. The context is GraphQL's way of passing additional information from the application to its query resolvers.

In the above example, note the *_ argument in the resolver's method signature. The underscore is a convention used in many languages (including Python) to indicate a variable that will not be used. The asterisk prefix is Python syntax that informs the method it should expect a variable-length argument list. In effect, the above example is throwing away any arguments passed to the resolver. We've used that here, to simplify the example so that you can focus on its purpose.

The default GraphQL server implementation provided by Ariadne defines info.context as a Python dict containing a single key named request containing a request object. We can use this in our resolver:

def resolve_hello(_, info):
    request = info.context["request"]
    user_agent = request.headers.get("user-agent", "guest")
    return "Hello, %s!" % user_agent

Notice that we are discarding the first argument in our resolver. This is because resolve_hello is a special type of resolver: it belongs to a field defined on a root type (Query), and such fields, by default, have no parent that could be passed to their resolvers. This type of resolver is called a root resolver.

Now we need to set our resolver on the hello field of type Query. To do this, we will use the QueryType class that sets resolver functions to the Query type in the schema. First, we will update our imports:

from ariadne import QueryType, gql

Next, we will instantiate the QueryType and set our function as resolver for hello field using its field decorator:

# Create QueryType instance for Query type defined in our schema...
query = QueryType()


# ...and assign our resolver function to its "hello" field.
@query.field("hello")
def resolve_hello(_, info):
    request = info.context["request"]
    user_agent = request.headers.get("user-agent", "guest")
    return "Hello, %s!" % user_agent

Making executable schema

Before we can run our server, we need to combine our textual representation of the API's shape with the resolvers we've defined above into what is called an "executable schema". Ariadne provides a function that does this for you:

from ariadne import make_executable_schema

You pass it your type definitions and resolvers that you want to use:

schema = make_executable_schema(type_defs, query)

In Ariadne the process of adding the Python logic to GraphQL schema is called binding to schema, and special types that can be passed to make_executable_schema's second argument are called bindables. QueryType (introduced earlier) is one of many bindables provided by Ariadne that developers will use when creating their GraphQL APIs.

In our first API we passed only a single bindable to the make_executable_schema, but most of your future APIs will likely pass a list of bindables instead, for example:

make_executable_schema(type_defs, [query, user, mutations, fallback_resolvers])

It's possible to call make_executable_schema without bindables, but doing so will result in your API handling very limited number of use cases: browsing schema types and, if you've defined root resolver, accessing root type's fields.

Testing the API

Now we have everything we need to finish our API, with the only missing piece being the HTTP server that would receive the HTTP requests, execute GraphQL queries and return responses.

Use an ASGI server like uvicorn, daphne, or hypercorn to serve your application:

$ pip install uvicorn

Create a ariadne.asgi.GraphQL instance for your schema:

from ariadne.asgi import GraphQL

app = GraphQL(schema, debug=True)

Run your script with uvicorn myscript:app (remember to replace myscript.py with the name of your file!). If all is well, you will see a message telling you that the simple GraphQL server is running at http://127.0.0.1:8000. Open this link in your web browser.

You will see the GraphiQL, the open source API explorer for GraphQL APIs. You can enter a { hello } query on the left, press the big purple "run" button, and see the result on the right:

Your first Ariadne GraphQL in action!

Your first GraphQL API build with Ariadne is now complete. Congratulations!

Completed code

For reference here is complete code of the API from this guide:

from ariadne import QueryType, gql, make_executable_schema
from ariadne.asgi import GraphQL

type_defs = gql("""
    type Query {
        hello: String!
    }
""")

# Create type instance for Query type defined in our schema...
query = QueryType()

# ...and assign our resolver function to its "hello" field.
@query.field("hello")
def resolve_hello(_, info):
    request = info.context["request"]
    user_agent = request.headers.get("user-agent", "guest")
    return "Hello, %s!" % user_agent

schema = make_executable_schema(type_defs, query)
app = GraphQL(schema, debug=True)
Resolvers →