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GraphQL API

Getting Started

For those new to the GitLab GraphQL API, see Getting started with GitLab GraphQL API.

Quick Reference

GraphiQL

Explore the GraphQL API using the interactive GraphiQL explorer, or on your self-managed GitLab instance on https://<your-gitlab-site.com>/-/graphql-explorer.

See the GitLab GraphQL overview for more information about the GraphiQL Explorer.

What is GraphQL?

GraphQL is a query language for APIs that allows clients to request exactly the data they need, making it possible to get all required data in a limited number of requests.

The GraphQL data (fields) can be described in the form of types, allowing clients to use clientside GraphQL libraries to consume the API and avoid manual parsing.

Since there's no fixed endpoints and datamodel, new abilities can be added to the API without creating breaking changes. This allows us to have a versionless API as described in the GraphQL documentation.

Vision

We want the GraphQL API to be the primary means of interacting programmatically with GitLab. To achieve this, it needs full coverage - anything possible in the REST API should also be possible in the GraphQL API.

To help us meet this vision, the frontend should use GraphQL in preference to the REST API for new features.

There are no plans to deprecate the REST API. To reduce the technical burden of supporting two APIs in parallel, they should share implementations as much as possible.

Available queries

The GraphQL API includes the following queries at the root level:

  1. project : Project information, with many of its associations such as issues and merge requests also available.
  2. group : Basic group information and epics (ULTIMATE) are currently supported.
  3. namespace : Within a namespace it is also possible to fetch projects.
  4. currentUser: Information about the currently logged in user.
  5. metaData: Metadata about GitLab and the GraphQL API.
  6. snippets: Snippets visible to the currently logged in user.

Root-level queries are defined in app/graphql/types/query_type.rb.

Multiplex queries

GitLab supports batching queries into a single request using apollo-link-batch-http. More info about multiplexed queries is also available for graphql-ruby the library GitLab uses on the backend.

Reference

GitLab's GraphQL reference is available.

It is automatically generated from GitLab's GraphQL schema and embedded in a Markdown file.

Machine-readable versions are also available: