Reorganize documentation to make room to grow (#84)
## Summary: In this commit I reorganize much of our documentation into a new `docs` directory, where there will hopefully be more room to grow and to organize things in a user-friendly way. There's almost no net-new documentation, although of course it's a great time to review it anyway. In particular: - I moved the documentation for the `genqlient.yaml` config file into an example file instead of GoDoc (which now just points to the example file); I think this will be a lot clearer for casual users. - I moved the documentation for the `@genqlient` directive out of GoDoc and into a GraphQL schema file (since while it's a comment it's all real syntax), likewise, and made the `GenqlientDirective` type private (since there's now nothing useful to do with it). - I moved `DESIGN.md` and the logo into `docs/` (just to keep the toplevel a bit cleaner), and separated the Contributing section of the README into `docs/CONTRIBUTING.md` (which github will automatically link on various issue and PR pages). This leaves it so that: - README.md is the only documentation at the toplevel (and will become just the high-level introduction as I add more user docs to `docs/`) - GoDoc is only documentation for if you want to call genqlient programmatically (which is fairly limited as the API surface is quite small: it's now just Main, Generate, and Config, plus a constructor, a single method, and a bunch of fields on the latter) In future commits, I'll add some more new documentation to the `docs` directory. Issue: https://github.com/Khan/genqlient/issues/26 ## Test plan: make check (and read the docs) Author: benjaminjkraft Reviewers: jvoll, benjaminjkraft, aberkan, dnerdy, MiguelCastillo, mahtabsabet Required Reviewers: Approved By: jvoll Checks: ✅ Lint, ✅ Test (1.17), ✅ Test (1.16), ✅ Test (1.15), ✅ Test (1.14), ✅ Test (1.17), ✅ Test (1.16), ✅ Test (1.15), ✅ Test (1.14), ✅ Lint Pull Request URL: https://github.com/Khan/genqlient/pull/84
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# genqlient: a truly type-safe Go GraphQL client
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This is a proof-of-concept of using code-generation to create a truly type-safe GraphQL client in Go. It is certainly not ready for production use nor for contributions (see [below](#development)).
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This is a proof-of-concept of using code-generation to create a truly type-safe GraphQL client in Go. It is certainly not ready for production use nor for contributions (see [docs/CONTRIBUTING.md](docs/CONTRIBUTING.md)).
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## Why another GraphQL client?
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@@ -21,7 +21,7 @@ fmt.Println(query.Me.Name)
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```
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While this code may seem type-safe, and at the Go level it is, there's nothing to check that the schema looks like you expect it to. In fact, perhaps here we're querying the GitHub API, in which the field is called `viewer`, not `me`, so this query will fail. More common than misusing the name of the field is mis-capitalizing it, since Go and GraphQL have somewhat different conventions there. And even if you get it right, it adds up to a lot of handwritten boilerplate! And that's the best case; other clients, such as [machinebox/graphql](https://github.com/machinebox/graphql), have even fewer guardrails to help you make the right query and use the result correctly. This isn't a big deal in a small application, but for serious production-grade tools it's not ideal.
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These problems should be entirely avoidable: GraphQL and Go are both typed languages; and GraphQL servers expose their schema in a standard, machine-readable format. We should be able to simply write a query `{ viewer { name } }`, have that automatically validated against the schema and turned into a Go struct which we can use in our code. In fact, there's already good prior art to do this sort of thing: [99designs/gqlgen](https://github.com/99designs/gqlgen) is a popular server library that generates types, and Apollo has a [codegen tool](https://www.apollographql.com/docs/devtools/cli/#supported-commands) to generate similar client-types for several other languages. (See [DESIGN.md](DESIGN.md) for more prior art.)
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These problems should be entirely avoidable: GraphQL and Go are both typed languages; and GraphQL servers expose their schema in a standard, machine-readable format. We should be able to simply write a query `{ viewer { name } }`, have that automatically validated against the schema and turned into a Go struct which we can use in our code. In fact, there's already good prior art to do this sort of thing: [99designs/gqlgen](https://github.com/99designs/gqlgen) is a popular server library that generates types, and Apollo has a [codegen tool](https://www.apollographql.com/docs/devtools/cli/#supported-commands) to generate similar client-types for several other languages. (See [docs/DESIGN.md](docs/DESIGN.md) for more prior art.)
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This is a GraphQL client that does the same sort of thing: you specify the query, and it generates type-safe helpers that make your query.
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@@ -59,7 +59,7 @@ fmt.Println("you are", viewerResp.Viewer.MyName)
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//go:generate go run github.com/Khan/genqlient
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```
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For a complete working example, see [`example/`](example). For configuration options, see [`go doc github.com/Khan/genqlient/generate.Config`](https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/Khan/genqlient/generate#Config).
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For a complete working example, see [`example/`](example). For configuration options, see [docs/genqlient.yaml](https://github.com/Khan/genqlient/blob/main/docs/genqlient.yaml).
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### Documentation for generated code
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@@ -70,25 +70,6 @@ For each GraphQL operation (query or mutation), genqlient generates a Go functio
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It returns a pointer to a struct representing the query-result, and an `error`. The struct will always be initialized (never nil), even on error. The error may be a `github.com/vektah/gqlparser/v2/gqlerror.List`, if it was a GraphQL-level error (in this case the returned struct may still contain useful data, if the API returns data even on error), or may be another error if, for example, the whole HTTP request failed (in which case the struct is unlikely to contain useful data). If the GraphQL operation has a comment immediately above it, that comment text will be used as the GoDoc for the generated function.
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The generated code may be customized using a directive-like syntax, `# @genqlient(...)`. For full documentation of options, see [`go doc github.com/Khan/genqlient/generate.GenqlientDirective`](https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/Khan/genqlient/generate#GenqlientDirective).
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The generated code may be customized using a directive-like syntax, `# @genqlient(...)`. For full documentation of options, see [docs/genqlient_directive.graphql](docs/genqlient_directive.graphql).
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TODO: consider inlining the direct stuff; and document generated types further.
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## Development
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genqlient is not yet accepting contributions. The library is still in a very rough state, so while we intend to accept contributions in the future, we're not ready for them just yet. Please contact us (via an issue or email) if you are interested in helping out, but please be aware the answer may be that we aren't ready for your help yet, even if such help will be greatly useful once we are! We'll be ready for the rest of the world soon.
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Khan Academy is a non-profit organization with a mission to provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. If you're looking for other ways to help us, You can help us in that mission by [donating](https://khanacademy.org/donate) or looking at [career opportunities](https://khanacademy.org/careers).
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### Tests
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To run tests and lint, `make check`. (GitHub Actions also runs them.)
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Notes for contributors:
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- Most of the tests are snapshot-based; see `generate/generate_test.go`. All new code-generation logic should be snapshot-tested. Some code additionally has standalone unit tests, when convenient.
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- Integration tests run against a gqlgen server in `internal/integration/integration_test.go`, and should cover everything that snapshot tests can't, including the GraphQL client code and JSON marshaling.
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- If `GITHUB_TOKEN` is available in the environment, it also checks that the example returns the expected output when run against the real API. This is configured automatically in GitHub Actions, but you can also use a [personal access token](https://docs.github.com/en/github/authenticating-to-github/creating-a-personal-access-token) with no scopes. There's no need for this to cover anything in particular; it's just to make sure the example in fact works.
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### Design
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See [DESIGN.md](DESIGN.md) for documentation of major design decisions in this library.
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