[FR] Look for default .graphql cached schema file

[khalwat]

Many editors with GraphQL plugins (PhpStorm, VS Code ) and GraphQL "playgrounds" allow you to give them a default .graphql schema file for auto-completion purposes. It's just a shortcut to having to rebuild the entire schema.

Since right now the Craft CMS GraphQL implementation doesn't build the full schema unless devMode is on, having such a default file would be useful:

        try {
            $devMode = Craft::$app->getConfig()->getGeneral()->devMode;
            $schemaDef = $gqlService->getSchemaDef($schema, $devMode);
            $result = GraphQL::executeQuery($schemaDef, $query, null, null, $variables, $operationName)
                ->toArray(true);
        } catch (\Throwable $e) {
            throw new GqlException('Something went wrong when processing the GraphQL query.', 0, $e);
        }

        return $this->asJson($result);
    }

The idea is that people could use the graphql console command to dump the schema, and then GraphiQL, various editors, etc. could then utilize it for auto-completion purposes without having to get the full schema back from Craft for the API.

In addition, support for graphql-config would be wonderful.

As @pauloelias said:

In addition to the 👍 I would also like to say this will be a huge help to our workflow since our headless CMS does not have devMode enabled. We still need to be able to test queries with the most up-to-date schema and I'd prefer not to have to fork this (now) huge database to a staging environment every time we update content models.

When we run headless we only spin up temporary review apps for each release but we don't need a long-running staging server in between releases because we don't need to worry about any frontend twig templates breaking.

Related: #4834

[andris-sevcenko]

Back when I toyed with this, building the schema from a .graphql file was incredibly slow.

But things should be good enough without this, as Craft now serves the full schema for introspection queries, right?

cc @khalwat @pauloelias

[khalwat]

yep especially now that we can just do this:

https://nystudio107.com/blog/graphql-schema-auto-completion-with-phpstorm

[andris-sevcenko]

Closing this, then.