Server Sent Events (SSE)

Server-Sent Events (SSE) are best for unidirectional communication where the server continuously sends data to the client, like live updates or notifications.

SSE is simpler to implement and more efficient for scenarios where client-to-server communication is minimal or not required. In contrast, WebSockets provide full-duplex communication, suitable for interactive applications like chat rooms or gaming. SSE is often the better choice for simpler, one-way data streaming applications due to its ease of use and lower overhead.

You can use SSE by setting Accept: text/event-stream on a regular GraphQL POST request. The document must be a subscription. Try out the following example:

Example

curl --location 'https://demo-router.fly.dev/graphql' \
--header 'Accept: text/event-stream' \
--data '{"query":"subscription test {\n currentTime {unixTime}\n}","operationName":"test"}'

Client Integration

To implement Server-Sent Events (SSE) with a GraphQL POST request, you’ll typically need to use a more custom approach than the standard EventSource. Here’s a full example using JavaScript’s fetch API with the ReadableStream interface. You can also copy paste this example in the Developer Console to test it.

var myHeaders = new Headers();
myHeaders.append("Accept", "text/event-stream");

var raw = JSON.stringify({
  "query": "subscription test {\n currentTime {unixTime}\n}",
  "operationName": "test"
});

var requestOptions = {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: myHeaders,
  body: raw,
  redirect: 'follow'
};

const response = await fetch("https://demo-router.fly.dev/graphql", requestOptions)

// To recieve data as a string we use TextDecoderStream class in pipethrough
const reader = response.body.pipeThrough(new TextDecoderStream()).getReader()

// Consume unless you reload the page. You can also use the AbortController API to close the connection.
while (true) {
  const {value, done} = await reader.read();
  if (done) break;
  // Remove the data: prefix and parse the message
  console.log('Received', JSON.parse(value.replace("data: ", "")));
}

This code doesn’t handle connection issues and retries.

Providing a compatible interface for EventSource is not very difficult to add, but we haven’t seen the need for it yet. If you require it, please open an issue in our repository.

We have deprecated the former way of triggering SSE (adding ?wg_sse=true to the end of your HTTP request). We will continue to support it for a short grace period.