As GraphQL picked up adoption, schema versioning surfaced as a practical challenge.
REST gave us
/v1/, /v2/ endpoints. But with GraphQL, you only get one endpoint — so how do you evolve a schema without breaking clients?I explored:
- Deprecation directives (
@deprecated)
- Federated schemas for isolated change
- Schema linting before mergingIn the end, what worked best was a client-usage analysis and traffic-aware evolution. If a field wasn’t being used, we removed it after two sprints of deprecation.
GraphQL offers flexibility, but you need discipline in schema governance.