Installation

In many situations, the easiest way to install Relay is with the create-relay-app package written by Tobias Tengler. Contrary to what the name suggests, this package installs Relay on your existing app.

It currently supports apps built on Next, Vite, and Create React App. If you aren't on one of those platforms, or if it doesn't work for you for some reason, proceed to the manual steps below.

To run it, make sure you have a clean working directory and run:

npm create @tobiastengler/relay-app

(or use yarn or pnpm instead of npm as you prefer).

When it's done it will print some "Next Steps" for you to follow.

More details about this script can be found at its GitHub repository.

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Manual Installation

Install React and Relay using yarn or npm:

yarn add react react-dom react-relay

Set up the compiler

Relay's ahead-of-time compilation requires the Relay Compiler, which you can install via yarn or npm:

yarn add --dev relay-compiler

This installs the bin script relay-compiler in your node_modules folder. It's recommended to run this from a yarn/npm script by adding a script to your package.json file:

"scripts": {
  "relay": "relay-compiler"
}

Compiler configuration

Create the configuration file:

// relay.config.js
module.exports = {
  // ...
  // Configuration options accepted by the `relay-compiler` command-line tool and `babel-plugin-relay`.
  src: "./src",
  language: "javascript", // "javascript" | "typescript" | "flow"
  schema: "./data/schema.graphql",
  excludes: ["**/node_modules/**", "**/__mocks__/**", "**/__generated__/**"],
}

This configuration also can be specified in "relay" section of the package.json file. For more details, and configuration options see: Relay Compiler Configuration

Set up babel-plugin-relay

Relay requires a Babel plugin to convert GraphQL to runtime artifacts:

yarn add --dev babel-plugin-relay graphql

Add "relay" to the list of plugins your .babelrc file:

{
  "plugins": [
    "relay"
  ]
}

Please note that the "relay" plugin should run before other plugins or presets to ensure the graphql template literals are correctly transformed. See Babel's documentation on this topic.

Alternatively, instead of using babel-plugin-relay, you can use Relay with babel-plugin-macros. After installing babel-plugin-macros and adding it to your Babel config:

const graphql = require('babel-plugin-relay/macro');

Running the compiler

After making edits to your application files, just run the relay script to generate new compiled artifacts:

yarn run relay

Alternatively, you can pass the --watch option to watch for file changes in your source code and automatically re-generate the compiled artifacts (Note: Requires watchman to be installed):

yarn run relay --watch

For more details, check out our Relay Compiler docs.

JavaScript environment requirements

The Relay packages distributed on NPM use the widely-supported ES5 version of JavaScript to support as many browser environments as possible.

However, Relay expects modern JavaScript global types (Map, Set, Promise, Object.assign) to be defined. If you support older browsers and devices which may not yet provide these natively, consider including a global polyfill in your bundled application, such as core-js or @babel/polyfill.

A polyfilled environment for Relay using core-js to support older browsers might look like:

require('core-js/es6/map');
require('core-js/es6/set');
require('core-js/es6/promise');
require('core-js/es6/object');

require('./myRelayApplication');

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