Pylon

The next generation of building APIs.
Automatic schema generation for your service logic.

Website · GitHub · Discord

Introduction

A framework for building GraphQL APIs without defining any kind of schema. It reduces the time spent on writing and maintaining API definitions, allowing you to focus solely on writing your service logic.

Why

We believe that the current approach to building APIs is outdated. Writing and maintaining API definitions is time-consuming and error-prone. When you already have TypeScript definitions, why not use them to infer the API schema? Pylon does exactly that.

Pylon also provides a set of tools to help you build, test, and deploy your APIs. We believe that building services should be easy and fun. Major functionalities like authentication, authorization, and context management are built-in, so you can focus on what matters most: your service logic.

With Pylon, you can build APIs faster, with fewer errors, and with less code.

Roadmap

We would love to hear your feedback and suggestions for new features. Please open an issue or join our Discord server to share your thoughts.

• Documentation: Improve the documentation and provide more examples.
• Testing: Add a test suite to ensure the stability of the framework. #7
• Breaking Change Detection: Implement a mechanism to detect breaking changes in the generated schema. #8
• Date-Based Versioning: Automatically version the service when backward-incompatible changes are made. This will ensure that clients are aware of the changes and can adapt accordingly. This should be similar to the way Shopify handles API versioning. #9
• GraphQL Directives: Allow users to define custom directives that can be used to modify the generated schema. These directives should then be applied to the service logic (schema) to provide additional functionality. More information can be found in the GraphQL spec.
• Support Custom Authentication: Currently, Pylon only supports OIDC for ZITADEL for authentication. We would like to add support for different authentication methods, such as JWT, OAuth, and others. This will then be used by the ´requireAuth´ function to authenticate / authorize users. #21
• Better Prisma Integration: Improve the integration with Prisma to provide a more seamless experience when working with databases. This includes better support for relations, pagination, and other features provided by Prisma. The main pain point is that prisma does not include relations by default, so a lot of manual work is required to add them. To solve this, we would like to leverage the prisma client extensions to automatically resolve relations and provide paginatable connections.
• Find Edge Cases: Find edge cases where the generated schema does not match the service logic, or build errors occur. This will help to improve the overall stability of the framework and provide a better developer experience.
• Fix the Sentry Integration: Currently, the Sentry integration is not working as expected. We would like to fix this and provide better error tracking capabilities for Pylon users.
• Integrate @getcronit/pylon-builder into @getcronit/pylon-dev: The pylon-builder package is used to generate the schema from the service logic. Currently, this is a separate package that gets installed alongside the pylon-dev package. This means that there could be version mismatches between the two packages. To solve this, we would like to integrate the builder into the dev package so that they are always in sync. This will also make it easier to maintain and update the packages.
• Spread the Word: Spread the word about Pylon and get more people involved in the project. This includes writing blog posts, creating videos, and sharing the project on social media.

Create

To create a new Pylon project, run the following command:

npm create pylon@latest

Afterwards, you can navigate to the newly created project and start the development server:

cd my-pylon
npm run dev

This will start the development server on http://localhost:3000.

Open the Pylon Playground in your browser and start building your API.

Develop

Update your service logic in the src directory.

import {app} from '@getcronit/pylon'

export const graphql = {
  Query: {
    user: (id: string) => {
      return {
        id,
        name: 'John Doe',
        email: 'johndoe@example.com'
      }
    },
    products: () => [
      {id: '1', name: 'Laptop', price: 999.99},
      {id: '2', name: 'Smartphone', price: 499.99},
      {id: '3', name: 'Tablet', price: 299.99}
    ]
  },
  Mutation: {
    updateUserEmail: (id: string, newEmail: string) => {
      return {
        id,
        email: newEmail
      }
    },
    createOrder: (userId: string, productIds: string[]) => {
      return {
        id: 'order-123',
        userId,
        productIds,
        status: 'PENDING'
      }
    }
  }
}

export default app

Query:

query GetUser {
  user(id: "1") {
    id
    name
    email
  }
}

query GetProducts {
  products {
    id
    name
    price
  }
}

Mutation:

mutation UpdateUserEmail {
  updateUserEmail(id: "1", newEmail: "johndoe2@example.com") {
    id
    email
  }
}

mutation CreateOrder {
  createOrder(userId: "1", productIds: ["1", "2"]) {
    id
    userId
    productIds
    status
  }
}

Deploy

Pylon is fully compatible with Cloudflare Workers, allowing you to deploy your service to the edge in just one minute. Watch the video below to see how easy it is to deploy a Pylon.

If you prefer to deploy your service to a different platform, you can use the provided Dockerfile to build a Docker image and deploy it to your favorite cloud provider.

docker build -t my-pylon .
docker run -p 3000:3000 my-pylon

Runtimes

Designed to be flexible, Pylon can be run on various platforms, including:

Bun.js	Node.js	Cloudflare Workers	Deno

Features

Pylon offers a comprehensive set of features to streamline the development of modern web services:

Feature	Description
Automatic Schema Generation	Pylon generates GraphQL schemas based on your TypeScript definitions, ensuring type safety and reducing manual coding effort.
Type Safety	By leveraging TypeScript, Pylon ensures that your services are type-safe, catching errors at compile time.
Authentication and Authorization	Built-in support for OIDC standard and integration with ZITADEL for managing user authentication and role-based access control.
Logging and Monitoring	Sentry for error tracking, providing robust monitoring capabilities.
Database Integration	Seamlessly works with Prisma to generate extended models that support automatic resolution of relations and paginatable connections.
Deployment Ready	Includes pre-configured Dockerfile for easy deployment using Docker or manual methods.

Playground

You can try Pylon in the Playground without installing anything. Or simply click the image below to open the Playground.

Contributing

Documentation, bug reports, pull requests, and other contributions are welcomed! See CONTRIBUTING.md for more information.

Support

• Community Support: Join the Pylon community on GitHub to report bugs and request features.
• Professional Support: For professional support and consulting services, contact office@cronit.io.
• Join the Pylon Discord server to connect with other users and contributors.

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Pylon is brought to you by Cronit.