PostGraphile V5 Status

About PostGraphile V5​

Production-ready and already powering many apps, V5 is a complete ground-up rewrite powered by Grafast, our cutting-edge planning and execution engine for GraphQL. It dramatically reduces Postgres load, supports true polymorphism, and introduces incremental delivery, executable schema exports, greater control over your schema, and much more. Its efficient and ergonomic extensibility guides you into the pit of success. It even introduces an “eject button” for when you feel the need to move beyond an autogenerated schema!

V5 remains in “release candidate” during final user testing, so minor adjustments may be needed between updates. Postgres-centric users who leverage trusted documents (highly recommended!) should experience particularly smooth sailing!

• Overview of new features
• Intro to V5 series on dev.to
• V5 Documentation
• V4 → V5 migration guide

Current Status​

Now that all four epics are complete, the release candidate is available and waiting for your sign-off. The runtime is ready, but the documentation and TypeScript types still need polish. This is the final opportunity to try PostGraphile V5 before the stable release and tell us what needs to be clearer or smoother.

How to help​

To help us shape the final release, you can:

• Try the release candidate on your real use cases and report back
  • Ship it in production, or run it on a staging branch
  • Send feedback — good & bad — through GitHub or Discord
  • Use benjie/ouch-my-finger to generate minimal reproductions
• Help address issues in the V5 Project Board
• Contribute to documentation, examples, and missing TypeScript annotations
• Sponsor us — you rely on our software, we rely on your financial support

Try the release candidate today​

Install the release candidate from npm, be sure to use the @rc tag for all related modules:

yarn add postgraphile@rc

You can also try the bundled CLI without installing:

npx pgl -P pgl/amber -e -c postgres:///my_db -s public

Replace the connection string and schema with your own values. If you are upgrading from V4, follow the migration guide and let us know where it can be improved.

Epics - COMPLETE!​

With the help of the community, we identified four major issues in our new planning engine, Grafast. These issues related to ergonomics, edge cases, or efficiency; they all required changes to user code (“plan resolvers”), so addressing them before release was vital.

Since fixing these issues required fundamental changes to the way the system works — re-architectures that took many months to complete — we called them “epics”. All four are now complete, hurrah!

• ✅ Everything is batched, but “unary” values (variables, context, etc) are now treated as a special case.
• ✅ Early termination of field execution with a null now has first-class support.
• ✅ Plan-time “peeking” at runtime values is now forbidden, improving plan re-use (aka remove $step.eval*()).
• ✅ The exponential polymorphic branching hazard is now eradicated by converging before branching again (achieved June 2025).

Milestone releases​

Some of the more notable recent releases are listed below. Graphile sponsors have access to release notes through our community support channels. Everyone else can see some detail in the PostGraphile changelog.