Benzene is a new take on GraphQL server that gives us the control we need while staying blazing fast.

Features

The @benzene/http and @benzene/ws packages allow us to build a full-featured GraphQL server, featuring:

• Super minimal (~4kB) and performant. @benzene/http and @benzene/ws purely wrap @benzene/core, which includes minimal dependencies and features no third-party integrations, thus avoiding unnecessary overheads.
• Transport & Framework agnostic. Each package features generic Request, Response, or WebSocket interfaces to easily plug into any JavaScript frameworks or runtimes: Node.js, Deno, Cloudflare Worker, etc.
• Customizable runtime. Use custom GraphQL implementation such as graphql-jit or rolling our own for performance and cutting-edge features.
• Unopinionated and observable APIs. Benzene does not include any middleware or configurations, so we can be in total control of logging, parsing, and error handling.
• Unified pipeline. Write error handling or context creation function only once. Every transport handler inherits the same Benzene instance and takes advantage of its shared configuration.
• Fully extensible. Despite not being battery-included, it can be extended with recipes (like Persisted queries) or @benzene/extra.

We are taking an approach opposite to Apollo Server, which abstracts everything behind its applyMiddleware function that includes unexpected and hard-to-customized "defaults". While our approach requires a bit more boilerplate, we achieve an observable and customizable server integration.

Documentation

Documentation is available at benzene.vercel.app

There is also a Getting Started section which shows how to build a real-time book voting app using both @benzene/http and @benzene/ws.

Examples

There are also various examples for integrations with different tools and frameworks.

Contributing

This repository uses the new npm v7 workspaces (yarn 1 workspace may also work). Please see contributing.md.

License

MIT