TODO: Provide a bit more guidance on what they're supposed to do and what they

Exercise: Develop with the Apollo Router

For this exercise, we're going to see how we can develop with the Apollo Router and begin to configure it for our platform APIs.

Prerequisites

You will need to download the Apollo Router and rover CLI.

Connecting the Apollo Router to GraphOS locally

The Apollo Router is a binary that we can run locally and connect to the graph in GraphOS. Let's first get familiar with running the router binary locally with GraphOS. After downloading the router, simply running ./router --help prints out the help. If the APOLLO_KEY and APOLLO_GRAPH_REF environment variables are set, the router will automatically configure with GraphOS for things like usage reporting and managed federation.

The router also has a development mode that enables

Using rover for easy-mode

Sometimes you need to test out a new thing with your existing graph and the rover cli makes that easy. It automatically configures the router in development mode and let's you configure whatever you need.

Configuring the Apollo Router

One of the most common configurations for the router is safelisting - docs - and it's something we recommend incorporating into your security strategy. The concept requires that consumers of your APIs pre-register the operations they want to run in production.

You'll need to create a router.yaml file in the same directory as the router binary and add the configuration for safelisting Hint, you can check the previous docs link for the configuration or see an example configuration:

Solutions

Make sure to keep your router running at the end of the exercise! We'll use it for a quick demonstration.