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Comment by hashkb | Hacker News Reader

I found it so awkward to configure authorization and to apply custom logic that I went crawling back to Rails to get my current project shipped. For me, the value of a graphql API just isn't enough to move me. Typescript all the way down isn't that big a deal. It's great on the frontend... but the backend wasn't broke. No need to fix.

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That's fair. :)

What were some of the authz pieces you struggled with?

Not OP, but the fact that the auth config (and table tracking config for that matter) is very UI-orientated is a bit of a pain point for us. Of course it all turns into a metadata json file, but:

1. It's one great big file, which makes it pretty unwieldy to maintain, other than by exporting from a Hasura instance.

2. The format doesn't seem to be very well documented. Making hand-writing changes quite difficult.

Pretty much every other piece of software we use allows us to take a code-first approach. So Hasura is a bit awkward in comparison.

Noted!

The CLI (esp. the new configv3), splits the metadata into modular YAML files for much easier config/review etc so that makes things easier. There's still more work to do here to make this easier.

Another option, if you're dealing with the metadata JSON directly, is also to write that entire metadata in code and spit out JSON.

@gavinray put together an amazing typescript SDK to write all the metadata in code:

https://github.com/hasura/graphql-engine/tree/master/contrib...

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