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New global ID format coming to GraphQL

The GitHub GraphQL API has been publicly available for over 4 years now. Its usage has grown immensely over time, and we’ve learned a lot from running one of the…

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The GitHub GraphQL API has been publicly available for over 4 years now. Its usage has grown immensely over time, and we’ve learned a lot from running one of the largest public GraphQL APIs in the world. Today, we are introducing a new format for object identifiers and a roll out plan that brings it to our GraphQL API this year.

What is driving the change?

As GitHub grows and reaches new scale milestones, we came to the realization that the current format of Global IDs in our GraphQL API will not support our projected growth over the coming years. The new format gives us more flexibility and scalability in handling your requests even faster.

What exactly is changing?

We are changing the Global ID format in our GraphQL API. As a result, all object identifiers in GraphQL will change and some identifiers will become longer than they are now. Since you can get an object’s Global ID via the REST API, these changes will also affect an object’s node_id returned via the REST API. Object identifiers will continue to be opaque strings and should not be decoded.

How will this be rolled out?

We understand that our APIs are a critical part of your engineering workflows, and our goal is to minimize the impact as much as possible. In order to give you time to migrate your implementations, caches, and data records to the new Global IDs, we will go through a gradual rollout and thorough deprecation process that includes three phases.

  1. Introduce new format: This phase will introduce the new Global IDs into the wild on a type by type basis, for newly created objects only. Existing objects will continue to have the same ID. We will start by migrating the least requested object types, working our way towards the most popular types. Note that the new Global IDs may be longer and, in case you were storing the ID, you should ensure you can store the longer IDs. During this phase, as long as you can handle the potentially longer IDs, no action is required by you. The expected duration of this phase is 3 months.
  2. Migrate: In this phase you should look to update your caches and data records. We will introduce migration tools allowing you to toggle between the two formats making it easy for you to update your caches to the new IDs. The migration tools will be detailed in a separate blog post, closer to launch date. You will be able to use the old or new IDs to refer to an object throughout this phase. The expected duration of this phase is 3 months.
  3. Deprecate: In this phase, all REST API requests and GraphQL queries will return the new IDs. Requests made with the old IDs will continue to work, but the response will only include the new ID as well as a deprecation warning. The expected duration of this phase is 3 months.

Once the three migration phases are complete, we will sunset the old IDs. All requests made using the old IDs will result in an error. Overall, the whole process should take 9 months, with the goal of giving you plenty of time to adjust and migrate to the new format.

Tell us what you think

If you have any concerns about the rollout of this change impacting your app, please contact us and include information such as your app name so that we can better assist you.

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