strawberry-django

Project Overview

strawberry-django is a Django extension of the Strawberry GraphQL framework, providing a complete GraphQL integration for Django projects. It generates type-safe GraphQL types, queries, mutations, and resolvers directly from Django models, with filtering, ordering, pagination, and permissions built in. Its query optimizer rewrites database queries automatically to avoid N+1 problems.

Turns Django models into GraphQL APIs via type annotations, halving the boilerplate.

Key Features

• Automatic type generation: GraphQL types from Django models with full type safety
• Advanced filtering: a filtering system with lookups like contains, exact, and in
• Pagination: built-in offset and Relay cursor pagination
• Ordering: sort results by any field with automatic ordering arguments
• CRUD mutations: auto-generated create, update, and delete mutations with validation
• Query optimizer: automatic select_related and prefetch_related to prevent N+1 queries
• Auth and permissions: Django auth integration with flexible permission rules
• Debug tooling: GraphiQL plus Django Debug Toolbar integration for query inspection

Target Audience

• Django developers adopting GraphQL
• Teams that need strongly typed API layers
• Projects migrating to or coexisting with GraphQL from Django REST
• Backend engineers focused on query performance

Quick Start

1. Install the extension: pip install strawberry-graphql-django
2. Declare GraphQL types with decorators

import strawberry_django
from strawberry import auto
from . import models

@strawberry_django.type(models.Fruit)
class Fruit:
    id: auto
    name: auto

3. Define the query and build the schema with the optimizer

import strawberry
import strawberry_django
from strawberry_django.optimizer import DjangoOptimizerExtension

@strawberry.type
class Query:
    fruits: list[Fruit] = strawberry_django.field()

schema = strawberry.Schema(query=Query, extensions=[DjangoOptimizerExtension])

4. Mount the view in urls.py: path('graphql/', AsyncGraphQLView.as_view(schema=schema))
5. Open http://localhost:8000/graphql/ to debug in GraphiQL

Core Advantages

• Less boilerplate: model-to-type mapping is automatic, shrinking API layer code
• Better query performance: the optimizer trims SQL per requested field, avoiding N+1
• Type safe: consistent with Strawberry types and friendly to mypy checks
• Native to Django: reuses Django auth, permissions, and validation as-is

System Requirements

Notes

• Version pairing: keep versions in sync with the strawberry-graphql core package
• Enable the optimizer explicitly: DjangoOptimizerExtension must be added to schema extensions to take effect