Deploying a Subgraph to the Hosted Service
If a network is not supported on the Hosted Service, you can run your own graph-node to index it.
This page explains how to deploy a subgraph to the Hosted Service. To deploy a subgraph you need to first install the Graph CLI. If you have not created a subgraph already, see creating a subgraph.
Before using the Hosted Service, create an account in our Hosted Service. You will need a Github account for that; if you don't have one, you need to create that first. Then, navigate to the Hosted Service, click on the 'Sign up with Github' button, and complete Github's authorization flow.
After creating an account, navigate to your dashboard. Copy the access token displayed on the dashboard and run graph auth --product hosted-service <ACCESS_TOKEN>
. This will store the access token on your computer. You only need to do this once, or if you ever regenerate the access token.
Before deploying the subgraph, you need to create it in The Graph Explorer. Go to the dashboard and click on the 'Add Subgraph' button and fill in the information below as appropriate:
Image - Select an image to be used as a preview image and thumbnail for the subgraph.
Subgraph Name - Together with the account name that the subgraph is created under, this will also define the account-name/subgraph-name
-style name used for deployments and GraphQL endpoints. This field cannot be changed later.
Account - The account that the subgraph is created under. This can be the account of an individual or organization. Subgraphs cannot be moved between accounts later.
Subtitle - Text that will appear in subgraph cards.
Description - Description of the subgraph, visible on the subgraph details page.
GitHub URL - Link to the subgraph repository on GitHub.
Hide - Switching this on hides the subgraph in the Graph Explorer.
After saving the new subgraph, you are shown a screen with help on how to install the Graph CLI, how to generate the scaffolding for a new subgraph, and how to deploy your subgraph. The first two steps were covered in the Defining a Subgraph section.
Deploying your subgraph will upload the subgraph files that you've built with yarn build
to IPFS and tell the Graph Explorer to start indexing your subgraph using these files.
You deploy the subgraph by running yarn deploy
After deploying the subgraph, the Graph Explorer will switch to showing the synchronization status of your subgraph. Depending on the amount of data and the number of events that need to be extracted from historical blocks, starting with the genesis block, syncing can take from a few minutes to several hours.
The subgraph status switches to Synced
once the Graph Node has extracted all data from historical blocks. The Graph Node will continue inspecting blocks for your subgraph as these blocks are mined.
When making changes to your subgraph definition, for example, to fix a problem in the entity mappings, run the yarn deploy
command above again to deploy the updated version of your subgraph. Any update of a subgraph requires that Graph Node reindexes your entire subgraph, again starting with the genesis block.
If your previously deployed subgraph is still in status Syncing
, it will be immediately replaced with the newly deployed version. If the previously deployed subgraph is already fully synced, Graph Node will mark the newly deployed version as the Pending Version
, sync it in the background, and only replace the currently deployed version with the new one once syncing the new version has finished. This ensures that you have a subgraph to work with while the new version is syncing.
In some cases, you will want to deploy the same subgraph to multiple networks without duplicating all of its code. The main challenge that comes with this is that the contract addresses on these networks are different.
Both graph build
(since v0.29.0
) and graph deploy
(since v0.32.0
) accept two new options:
Options:...--network <name> Network configuration to use from the networks config file--network-file <path> Networks config file path (default: "./networks.json")
You can use the --network
option to specify a network configuration from a json
standard file (defaults to networks.json
) to easily update your subgraph during development.
Note: The init
command will now auto-generate a networks.json
based on the provided information. You will then be able to update existing or add additional networks.
If you don't have a networks.json
file, you'll need to manually create one with the following structure:
{"network1": { // the network name"dataSource1": { // the dataSource name"address": "0xabc...", // the contract address (optional)"startBlock": 123456 // the startBlock (optional)},"dataSource2": {"address": "0x123...","startBlock": 123444}},"network2": {"dataSource1": {"address": "0x987...","startBlock": 123},"dataSource2": {"address": "0xxyz..","startBlock": 456}},...}
Note: You don't have to specify any of the templates
(if you have any) in the config file, only the dataSources
. If there are any templates
declared in the subgraph.yaml
file, their network will be automatically updated to the one specified with the --network
option.
Now, let's assume you want to be able to deploy your subgraph to the mainnet
and goerli
networks, and this is your subgraph.yaml
:
# ...dataSources:- kind: ethereum/contractname: Gravitynetwork: mainnetsource:address: '0x123...'abi: Gravitymapping:kind: ethereum/events
This is what your networks config file should look like:
{"mainnet": {"Gravity": {"address": "0x123..."}},"goerli": {"Gravity": {"address": "0xabc..."}}}
Now we can run one of the following commands:
# Using default networks.json fileyarn build --network goerli# Using custom named fileyarn build --network goerli --network-file path/to/config
The build
command will update your subgraph.yaml
with the goerli
configuration and then re-compile the subgraph. Your subgraph.yaml
file now should look like this:
# ...dataSources:- kind: ethereum/contractname: Gravitynetwork: goerlisource:address: '0xabc...'abi: Gravitymapping:kind: ethereum/events
Now you are ready to yarn deploy
.
Note: As mentioned earlier, since graph-cli 0.32.0
you can directly run yarn deploy
with the --network
option:
# Using default networks.json fileyarn deploy --network goerli# Using custom named fileyarn deploy --network goerli --network-file path/to/config
One solution for older graph-cli versions that allows to parameterize aspects like contract addresses is to generate parts of it using a templating system like Mustache or Handlebars.
To illustrate this approach, let's assume a subgraph should be deployed to mainnet and Goerli using different contract addresses. You could then define two config files providing the addresses for each network:
{"network": "mainnet","address": "0x123..."}
and
{"network": "goerli","address": "0xabc..."}
Along with that, you would substitute the network name and addresses in the manifest with variable placeholders {{network}}
and {{address}}
and rename the manifest to e.g. subgraph.template.yaml
:
# ...dataSources:- kind: ethereum/contractname: Gravitynetwork: mainnetnetwork: {{network}}source:address: '0x2E645469f354BB4F5c8a05B3b30A929361cf77eC'address: '{{address}}'abi: Gravitymapping:kind: ethereum/events
In order to generate a manifest to either network, you could add two additional commands to package.json
along with a dependency on mustache
:
{..."scripts": {..."prepare:mainnet": "mustache config/mainnet.json subgraph.template.yaml > subgraph.yaml","prepare:goerli": "mustache config/goerli.json subgraph.template.yaml > subgraph.yaml"},"devDependencies": {..."mustache": "^3.1.0"}}
To deploy this subgraph for mainnet or Goerli you would now simply run one of the two following commands:
# Mainnet:yarn prepare:mainnet && yarn deploy# Goerli:yarn prepare:goerli && yarn deploy
A working example of this can be found here.
Note: This approach can also be applied to more complex situations, where it is necessary to substitute more than contract addresses and network names or where generating mappings or ABIs from templates as well.
If a subgraph syncs successfully, that is a good sign that it will continue to run well forever. However, new triggers on the network might cause your subgraph to hit an untested error condition or it may start to fall behind due to performance issues or issues with the node operators.
Graph Node exposes a graphql endpoint which you can query to check the status of your subgraph. On the Hosted Service, it is available at https://api.thegraph.com/index-node/graphql
. On a local node, it is available on port 8030/graphql
by default. The full schema for this endpoint can be found here. Here is an example query that checks the status of the current version of a subgraph:
{indexingStatusForCurrentVersion(subgraphName: "org/subgraph") {syncedhealthfatalError {messageblock {numberhash}handler}chains {chainHeadBlock {number}latestBlock {number}}}}
This will give you the chainHeadBlock
which you can compare with the latestBlock
on your subgraph to check if it is running behind. synced
informs if the subgraph has ever caught up to the chain. health
can currently take the values of healthy
if no errors occurred, or failed
if there was an error which halted the progress of the subgraph. In this case, you can check the fatalError
field for details on this error.
The Hosted Service is a free Graph Node Indexer. Developers can deploy subgraphs indexing a range of networks, which will be indexed, and made available to query via graphQL.
To improve the performance of the service for active subgraphs, the Hosted Service will archive subgraphs that are inactive.
A subgraph is defined as "inactive" if it was deployed to the Hosted Service more than 45 days ago, and if it has received 0 queries in the last 45 days.
Developers will be notified by email if one of their subgraphs has been marked as inactive 7 days before it is removed. If they wish to "activate" their subgraph, they can do so by making a query in their subgraph's Hosted Service graphQL playground. Developers can always redeploy an archived subgraph if it is required again.
When a new version of a subgraph is deployed, the previous version is archived (deleted from the graph-node DB). This only happens if the previous version is not published to The Graph's decentralized network.
When a subgraph version isn’t queried for over 45 days, that version is archived.
Every subgraph affected with this policy has an option to bring the version in question back.