Enable Apollo Explorer and GraphQL Voyager Plugins in Harness IDP
F
Fairy tale Canidae
Problem Statement
Our API Platform and API Governance teams are leveraging Harness IDP as the strategic enterprise developer portal for API discovery, cataloging, governance, and self-service developer enablement. While Harness IDP provides strong catalog capabilities, it currently lacks support for two key GraphQL ecosystem plugins commonly available in Backstage:
Apollo Explorer
GraphQL Voyager
These plugins are currently not enabled/supported within Harness IDP and require custom implementation or external tooling. This creates a fragmented developer experience and limits the ability of application teams to discover, understand, validate, and consume GraphQL APIs directly within the IDP experience.
F
Fairy tale Canidae
Business Impact
Without native support for these plugins:
Developers must leave Harness IDP to inspect GraphQL schemas.
API discovery experience becomes fragmented.
GraphQL API onboarding requires additional tooling.
API Governance teams lose a centralized developer experience.
Enterprise API Portal initiatives cannot fully leverage Harness IDP as a one-stop API platform.
Additional custom plugin maintenance introduces operational overhead and governance concerns.
Requested Capability
Apollo Explorer
Provide native support within Harness IDP to:
Browse GraphQL schemas.
Explore queries and mutations.
View schema documentation.
Test GraphQL operations.
Discover API capabilities interactively.
Support authenticated GraphQL endpoints.
GraphQL Voyager
Provide native support within Harness IDP to:
Visualize GraphQL schema relationships.
Display entity dependencies and connections.
Navigate schema structures interactively.
Improve developer understanding of complex APIs.
Support large enterprise GraphQL schemas.
Proposed User Experience
Within an API Catalog entity:
New Tabs
Explorer
Interactive Apollo Explorer view.
Query execution.
Schema documentation.
GraphQL playground experience.
Schema Visualization
GraphQL Voyager view.
Interactive schema graph.
Entity relationship navigation.
Dependency exploration.
Expected Benefits
Developer Experience
Faster API onboarding.
Reduced learning curve.
Self-service API exploration.
Improved productivity.
API Governance
Better API discoverability.
Increased API adoption.
Centralized API documentation.
Improved schema visibility.
Enterprise Platform
Strengthens Harness IDP as the enterprise API portal.
Reduces dependency on external GraphQL tooling.
Provides consistent user experience across REST and GraphQL APIs.
Aligns with enterprise API catalog and governance objectives.
Preferred Solution
The preferred solution is a vendor-supported Harness capability rather than requiring customers to install and maintain custom Backstage plugins.
F
Fairy tale Canidae
Reasons:
Reduced operational burden.
Improved supportability.
Consistent upgrade path.
Better security and governance controls.
Enterprise-scale adoption without plugin lifecycle management concerns.
Priority
High
Requested Release
Upcoming Harness IDP roadmap consideration.
Justification
This capability directly supports Citizens Bank's Enterprise API Portal strategy and improves GraphQL API discoverability, developer experience, and governance through Harness IDP while avoiding unsupported custom plugin maintenance.
This draft is already aligned with the style of the other Harness feature requests you've previously submitted (Vault support, editable enums, array/object payloads, hidden API responses, etc.), so it should fit cleanly into your existing Harness enhancement tracker.