GraphQL with Swift

Know that thing where you start writing a tool for something, discover it needs (for some values of “need”) something slightly complicated, you decide to write a library for said complicated thing, then discover you don’t need the tool you were working on in the first place but decide to write the library anyway?

So I wrote GraphQLer (pronounced “graph quiller”), a library for generating GraphQL from Swift. It’s not the only Swift GraphQL library around, but I believe it’s far simpler — mostly by being far less ambitious — than the other solutions. Throwing in the kitchen sink seems to be popular in this space, forcing you to shape your code around the libraries. That may work out great in some situations, but it wasn’t what I wanted.

GraphQLer just defines a bunch of data types that model the things found in the spec, and functions for turning those data types into strings. Its only purpose is to make it easier to write syntactically valid GraphQL documents. It has no dependencies — it doesn’t even import Foundation — and you handle all networking and responses as you see fit.

It works with the Swift Package Manager. There’s also a Xcode workspace and a playground, but you need to run SPM to get an Xcode project. I'll add an Xcode project if I have to to make it work with Carthage, but the WWDC 2019 keynote is tomorrow and I'm hoping there will be surprises related to SPM.

PS. A shout out to jazzy and GitHub Pages: it's ridiculous how easy it is to publish documentation for a Swift project these days.