Extending Lighthouse

Lighthouse offers various extension points which can be utilized by package developers as well as end users.

The Event System

Lighthouse offers a unified way of hooking into the complete execution lifecycle through Laravel's event system (opens new window). You may use any Service Provider to register listeners.

A complete list of all dispatched events is available in the events API reference.

Adding Directives

Add your custom directives to Lighthouse by listening for the RegisterDirectiveNamespaces event.

namespace SomeVendor\SomePackage;

use Illuminate\Contracts\Events\Dispatcher as EventsDispatcher;
use Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider;
use Nuwave\Lighthouse\Events\RegisterDirectiveNamespaces;

final class SomePackageServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
{
    public function boot(EventsDispatcher $dispatcher): void
    {
        $dispatcher->listen(
            RegisterDirectiveNamespaces::class,
            // May also return an iterable with multiple strings if needed
            static fn (): string => 'SomeVendor\SomePackage\Directives',
        );
    }

Changing the default resolver

Lighthouse will fall back to using webonyx's default resolver (opens new window) for non-root fields, see resolver precedence. You may overwrite this by passing a callable to GraphQL\Executor\Executor::setDefaultFieldResolver().

Use a custom GraphQLContext

The context is the third argument of any resolver function.

You may replace the default \Nuwave\Lighthouse\Schema\Context with your own implementation of the interface Nuwave\Lighthouse\Support\Contracts\GraphQLContext. The following example is just a starting point of what you can do:

namespace Nuwave\Lighthouse\Schema;

use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Auth\Authenticatable;
use Nuwave\Lighthouse\Support\Contracts\GraphQLContext;

final class MyContext implements GraphQLContext
{
    public function __construct(
        public Request $request
    ) {}

    public function request(): Request
    {
        return $this->request;
    }

    public function user(): ?Authenticatable
    {
        // TODO implement yourself
    }
}

You need a factory that creates an instance of \Nuwave\Lighthouse\Support\Contracts\GraphQLContext. This factory class needs to implement \Nuwave\Lighthouse\Support\Contracts\CreatesContext.

namespace App\GraphQL;

use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Nuwave\Lighthouse\Support\Contracts\CreatesContext;
use Nuwave\Lighthouse\Support\Contracts\GraphQLContext;

final class MyContextFactory implements CreatesContext
{
    public function generate(Request $request): GraphQLContext
    {
        return new MyContext($request);
    }
}

Rebind the interface in a service provider (e.g. your AppServiceProvider or a new GraphQLServiceProvider):

public function register(): void
{
    $this->app->bind(
        \Nuwave\Lighthouse\Support\Contracts\CreatesContext::class,
        \App\MyContextFactory::class
    );
}