Deferred Fields

Experimental: not enabled by default, not guaranteed to be stable.

Deferring fields allows you to prioritize fetching data needed to render the most important content as fast as possible, and then loading the rest of the page in the background.

Lighthouse adds support for the @defer directive (opens new window) through an extension.

Setup

Add the service provider to your config/app.php:

'providers' => [
    \Nuwave\Lighthouse\Defer\DeferServiceProvider::class,
],

Configuration

Consider the configuration options under defer in your config/lighthouse.php to prevent deferred queries from running to long.

(image from https://blog.apollographql.com/introducing-defer-in-apollo-server-f6797c4e9d6e (opens new window))