Metadelta beta for Hasura

Explore Hasura permissions with confidence!

Metadelta allows you to view Hasura's sophisticated permission rules, and in particular changes to those permissions. The "diff" mode is useful during code review, to gain a full understanding of changes before approving, and the "single" mode is useful for exploration of an existing permission setup.

About

Hasura is a lovely and widely-used GraphQL server. An important part of most Hasura setups is the configuration of permissions for accessing and manipulating the underlying records in the database.

Metadelta allows you view these permissions in a convenient way; either in a "single" way (just point it at a Hasura metdata folder), or a "diff" way (point it at an "old" and a "new" one!)

The advantage of using Metadelta for exploring the permissions (especially the permission changes) is that, when your permission architecture gets even moderately complicated, it can be hard to get a complete and comprehensive view of all the changes: the roles impacted, the tables impacted, etc. This is where Metadelta comes in!

Features

  • 👀 View the permission information for a particular metadata instance,
  • 🚀 Automate the creation (via a CI step) of a diff-based view, that allows you to see the exact permission changes, on, say, a Pull Request,
  • 🔎 Various filtering/grouping options to gain a complete understanding of permission changes.

Try it out!

👀

Explore the demos

We have pre-computed a couple of diffs from the demo-database repository that you can explore in the Metadelta UI.

Take a look
🚀

GitHub Action integration

Whenever a PR changes permissions, this workflow will compute a diff and create a link to view that in the UI so reviewers can understand the full impact of changes.

Learn more

Run Metadelta locally

If you would like to test out the Metadelta CLI locally, you can use our docker image.

As an example this invokes the diff command on two folders in the present working directory called "old" and "new": 

docker run -i \
  -v $PWD:/work \
  ghcr.io/invariantclub/metadelta \
  diff \
  -o /work/old/hasura/metadata \
  -n /work/new/hasura/metadata \
  >diff.json

Then you can take the diff.json file and paste it into the Metadelta UI. For a more convenient workflow, we recommend using the GitHub Action integration, which you can see in action on our demo-database.

If you would like to just run it on a pre-made example, you can clone our demo-database repo and use the scripts: 

git clone https://github.com/InvariantClub/demo-database
cd demo-database/
./scripts/compute-demo-diff.sh 98b1123 3b627cd

And again paste the resulting JSON output to the UI.

Source code

Metadelta is completely open-source, you can find the code here: InvariantClub/metadelta on GitHub.

Supporting this project

Metadelta will always be free for open-source projects, and is, while we're in beta, free for any project at all.

If you have a project that you think this would be useful for, or you have any other feedback, please reach out; either via email: noonsilk+metadelta@gmail.com or on our issue tracker: metadelta/issues.

FAQs

  • Q: Will this be compatible with Hasura V3?
    A: Yes. It looks as if V3 will have some additional permission abilities that we will work to support as it comes out of alpha; but our intention is to be fully compatible.

Note: Metadelta is not an official Hasura product; it is provided and supported entirely by Invariant Club, an independent third party.