App layout

Pothos tries not to be opinionated about how you structure your code, and provides multiple ways of doing many things. This short guide covers a few conventions I use, as a starting place for anyone who is just looking for a decent setup that should just work. Everything suggested here is just a recommendation and is completely optional.

Files

Here are a few files I create in almost every Pothos schema I have built:

• src/server.ts: Setup and run your server (This might be graphql-yoga or @apollo/server)

• src/builder.ts: Setup for your schema builder. Does not contain any definitions for types in your schema

• src/schema.ts or src/schema/index.ts: Imports all the files that define part of your schema, but does not define types itself. Exports builder.toSchema()

• src/types.ts: Define shared types used across your schema including a type for you context object. This should be imported when creating your builder, and may be used by many other files.

• src/schema/*.ts: Actual definitions for your schema types.

Imports

Import types directly from the files that define them rather than importing from another files like index.ts that re-exports them. index.ts files can still be useful for loading all files in a directory, but they should generally NOT export any values.

Plugins

Which plugins you use is completely up to you. For my own projects, I will use the simple-objects, scope-auth, and mocks plugins in every project, and some of the other plugins as needed.

mocks and scope-auth are fairly self explanatory. The simple-objects plugin can make building out a graph much quicker, because you don't have to have explicit types or models for every object in your graph. I frequently find that I just want to add on object of a specific shape, and then let the parent field figure out how to return an object of the right shape.

Backing models

Pothos gives you a lot of control over how you define the types that your schema and resolver use. Which can make figuring out the right approach can be confusing at first. In my projects, I try to avoid using the SchemaTypes approach for defining backing models. Instead, I tend to use model classes for defining most of the important objects in my graph, and fall back to using either the simple-objects plugin or builder.objectRef<Shape>(name).implement({...}) when it does not make sense to define a class for my data.

Co-locating queries

In bigger graphs, having all your queries/entry points defined in once place can become hard to manage. Instead, I prefer to define queries along side the types they return. For example, queries for a User type would be defined in the same file that contains the definition for the User type, rather than in a central queries.ts file (using builder.queryField).