Skip to main content
Version: 8.1

Studio

RedwoodJS Studio is a package used during development to gain runtime insights into a project.

Motivation​

Redwood provides tools that lets developers "get to work on what makes your application special, instead of wasting cycles choosing and re-choosing various technologies and configurations."1.

Much happens while your app processes a request: Invoke a function; handle a GraphQL request; resolve the request with a service; build and execute a SQL statement; connect to the database; handle the query response; further resolve the response so it contains all the data needed; return the result ... and more.

While logging can show you some of these steps, there is no easy way to see how they relate to each other, compare, or break down individual timings. Observability needed to debug, iterate, try out, and refactor your code is lacking.

We hope Studio helps solve this problem with an observability tool that combines:

  • Tracing with OpenTelemetry (service and GraphQL)

  • SQL statement logging

  • general metrics (how many invocations)

  • GraphiQL playground with impersonated authentication

With Studio, it is easier to:

  • identify slow running SQL statements without reviewing captured log files

  • identify and improve N+1 queries by comparing before and after traces

  • impersonate the user authentication headers in GraphiQL

Redwood Studio is a command line tool which offers a web UI aimed at providing insights into your application via OpenTelemetry ingestion and other development conveniences like auth-impersonation within GraphiQL.

Demo​

Setup​

There is no setup needed to begin using the studio; simply execute the following command to start the studio at localhost:4318:

yarn rw studio

The first time you run this command it will likely install the studio package which may take a small amount of time.

OpenTelemetry​

If you want studio to pick up telemetry from you app automatically please ensure you've setup opentelemetry. A guide on this can be found here

Features​

GraphiQL Auth Impersonation​

You need to configure Studio using settings inside redwood.toml for auth impersonation to work. See the sections below for detailed information.

DbAuth​

Requires a SESSION_SECRET environment variable for cookie encryption.

redwood.toml example:

[studio.graphiql.authImpersonation]
  authProvider = "dbAuth"
  email = "user@example.com"
  userId = "1"
Netlify​

Since Netlify does not expose the JWT secret used to sign the token in production, impersonation requires a jwtSecret to encode and decode the auth token.

redwood.toml example:

[studio.graphiql.authImpersonation]
  authProvider = "netlify"
  email = "user@example.com"
  userId = "1"
  jwtSecret = "some-secret-setting"
Supabase​

Requires a SUPABASE_JWT_SECRET environment variable for JWT signing.

redwood.toml example:

[studio.graphiql.authImpersonation]
  authProvider = "supabase"
  email = "user@example.com"
  userId = "1"

Settings​

All settings for Studio are located in redwood.toml, which you can find at the root of your Redwood project.

  • [studio.graphiql.authImpersonation].* – Used to gain access to GraphQL endpoints that require authentication. See section above on auth impersonation for more details.
  • [studio].basePort – Studio's web front-end will run on this port (default: 4318). It is also used to calculate the port for the mailer integration and other things. Please choose a port that is not already in use, and that has a few more free ports available next to it.

Database File​

Studio stores the ingested telemetry to studio/prisma.db within the .redwood folder. You should not need to touch this file other than if you wish to delete it to erase any existing telemetry data.

Availability​

Along the release of Redwood v7, Studio has been rewritten and is available as a stable version. Just run yarn rw studio to start it! Prior to RW v7 Studio was available as an experimental feature. If you're still not using the stable version of RW v7, see this forum topic for information on the old experimental version of Studio https://community.redwoodjs.com/t/redwood-studio-experimental/4771