gqlfake

A CLI tool that can be used to create fake, structured data using GraphQL schemas to specify fields and data types.

What Does it Do?

gqlfake inputs your GraphQL schema file, goes through each type, and creates JSON objects that match the type's shape and contain fake (but realistic) data.

Installation

To install and use gqlfake, you must have Node.js installed.

We can install gqlfake with npm:

npm i gqlfake --location=global

This command will globally install gqlfake so you can access the CLI tool in the terminal from any path.

QuickStart

Say we have a GraphQL schema file titled schema.graphql with the following content:

type User {
  name: String @generate(code: "return faker.person.fullName()")
  avatar_url: String @generate(code: "return faker.internet.avatar()")
}

The above schema defines a User type with specific attributes. Both the name and avatar_url fields use the @generate directive to define the kind of data that should be generated per field. This is a custom directive that gqlfake parses, and does not need to be defined in your GraphQL schema. Inside this directive, we use the faker.js library to generate name and avatar data.

We can now use the following command to create a JSON file that contains 100 such User objects:

gqlfake generate --schema-path ./schema.graphql --num-documents 100

The resulting JSON file will be stored in a folder called datagen.

Here is an example of what this file will look like:

[
  {
    "name": "Beverly Block",
    "avatar_url": "https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/Qmd3W5DuhgHirLHGVixi6V76LhCkZUz6pnFt5AJBiyvHye/avatar/624.jpg"
  },
  {
    "name": "Wilson Zulauf",
    "avatar_url": "https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/Qmd3W5DuhgHirLHGVixi6V76LhCkZUz6pnFt5AJBiyvHye/avatar/684.jpg"
  },
  {
    "name": "Kirk Kris",
    "avatar_url": "https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/Qmd3W5DuhgHirLHGVixi6V76LhCkZUz6pnFt5AJBiyvHye/avatar/866.jpg"
  },
  ...97 more
]

Run gqlfake --help for more information on gqlfake commands and their syntax.