Quickstart

#Overview

This quickstart guide shows the basic mechanics you need to create a Hygraph project with a schema.

We also have a Getting Started tutorial that covers these subjects - and more - in depth, where you can follow step-by-step lessons that will take you from project creation to frontend connection.

#Register

1. Go to https://app.hygraph.com/signup.
   If you accidentally clicked on the Login option instead of Sign up on our website and landed on https://app.hygraph.com/login, simply select the Register tab to continue.

2. Select one of the available options - GitHub or Google - or manually add your email, password and name.
3. Select the checkbox to agree to the terms of service and privacy policy, and click Continue.
4. You will receive a verification email. Click on the provided link and log in using your information.

You will land on your project directory. If you have pending project invites to accept, you will find them at the top of the screen.

This is where you will see all your projects and where you can create new ones.

#Create a project

When you log into Hygraph, you will see a list of all projects you created or have been invited to. If you're new to Hygraph, this section might be empty.

To create a project, click + New project at the top-right corner of the project directory.

New project

You can alternatively scroll down to use one of our Starters.

New starter project

#Blank project

To create a blank project, click + New project at the top-right corner of the project directory. The New project modal will display:

Blank new project

1. Select a plan: The New project modal lets you select Hobby, Enterprise, or start your 30-day trial. To learn which plan is the best for you, check out our Pricing page.
2. Project info: Give your project a name and an optional description, then use the dropdown menu to select a region to store your content. If you need a custom region, you can talk to sales.
3. Finalize: Click Add project to create the blank project. The system will redirect you to the project homepage.

#Starter

Our Starters are projects you can clone, with a schema and models already set up.

To create a starter project, scroll down to the Starters section of the project directory, select a project and click Get started. The New project modal will display:

Starter new project

1. Select a plan: The New project modal lets you select Hobby, Enterprise, or start your 30-day trial. To learn which plan is the best for you, check out our Pricing page.
2. Project info: You can use the default project name & description or add your own, then use the dropdown menu to select a region to store your content. If you need a custom region, you can talk to sales using the link provided there.
3. Include Starter content checkbox: Select this checkbox to import existing Starter content into the project.
4. Finalize: Click Add project to create the Starter project. The system will redirect you to the project homepage.

#Create a model

Let's create a model for our products.

Creating a product model

1. Navigate to the Schema builder.
2. Use the + Add button, create a new model called Product, keeping the default suggested values for API ID and Plural API ID.
3. You can optionally set a Description that will show for content editors inside the app, and within the GraphQL API schema.
4. Click Add

Once the model is created, you can start adding fields to it, which we will do in the next step.

#Add fields to your model

We will now add some fields to our Product model for a product Name, Price and Image.

Every time we need to add a field, we will select one of the field types from the right sidebar of the schema builder.

Different field types may require for us to fill in different information.

In this Quickstart, we will add three fields to our Product model: One for product name, one for product price and one for product images. Check out our document on field types to learn more about all the types of fields you can add to your schema.

#Create a name field

Creating a name field

1. Select Single line text field from the right sidebar.
2. Set the Display name to Name.
3. Click on the Validations tab and select the Make field required checkbox.
4. Click Add.

#Create a price field

Creating a price field

1. Select the Number field from the right sidebar. You'll find it in the Integer section.
2. Set the Display name to Price.
3. Click on the Validations tab and select the Make field required checkbox.
4. Click Add.

#Create an image field

Creating an image field

1. Select the Asset picker field from the right sidebar. You'll find it in the Asset section.
2. Set the Display name to Image.
3. Select the Allow multiple assets checkbox. This will later allow you to add more than one image to your product content entries.
4. Click Add.

#Explore system fields

By default, Hygraph handles system fields for things such as the id, createdAt, publishedAt, and more.

You can see all of the system fields for your selected model by clicking on Show system fields.

Show system fields

#Create a content entry

We will now add some content for our newly created Product model.

Add entry

1. Navigate to the Content editor in your Hygraph project.
2. Select the Product view from the Default views list. If your project only has the Product model so far, this view will display automatically when you access the content editor.
3. Your content entries table for Product is currently empty. To create content, click + Add entry at the top-right corner of the screen.
4. A form will display where you can enter the details for your new product. As you can see, the information you can complete here is the fields that we added to the model before.
5. Go ahead and add your product details, this can be anything you like!
6. To upload one or more images for your product. You can do this by clicking Add existing Images, and choosing a file from your computer to upload.
7. Click on Save in the top-right corner of the screen. This action saves without publishing, meaning the content will be in the DRAFT state. You can continue to make changes to your content entry, and then save it again as many times as you want.

Entry in DRAFT stage

#Publish your content

You can publish your first content entry by clicking Publish at the top-right corner of the screen while editing your content entry.

Publish your content

By default, all projects come with a DRAFT and PUBLISHED content stages. In this context, publishing an entry means to promote it to the PUBLISHED stage, so the content is live and others can consume it.

Once you click on Publish, a confirmation modal displays. This modal will also include any related entries or assets that are currently in the DRAFT stage and may need publishing as well.

The following image shows how Hygraph asks if you would like to also publish the assets related to your entry that are in the DRAFT stage:

Publish your entry & assets

You should use the checkbox to Select all, and then click Publish.

You can continue to make changes to your content entry, and then save it again as many times as you want without publishing. When you save but don't publish, you'll see inside of the stages list that the entry is now outdated, meaning that the published version live on your website is different from the latest version in our Hygraph project.

A blue "Published" pill indicates that the content entry is outdated

Click here to learn more about our system content stages.

#Query content

For any content model you create, Hygraph will automatically generate queries to fetch content entries, as well as mutations to create, update, delete, publish, and unpublish them.

You can try out all of the queries, and mutations your project has inside of the API Playground.

You can visit the API Playground by navigating to it from the sidebar:

The API Playground

If you begin to type inside of the API Playground product you will see autosuggest recommend some queries. We'll get the query to fetch a single product entry, multiple, an individual product version, and the connection query to fetch edges/nodes.

Let's use the products query to fetch all of our product content entries, as well as the fields for name, price, and the image:

{
  products {
    name
    price
    image {
      url
      fileName
    }
  }
}

If you execute this query using the "Play icon" you'll get the results of the content entries you saved.

#Mutate content

For any content model you create, Hygraph will automatically generate GraphQL mutations so you can create, update, delete, publish, and unpublish content entries.

You can try out all of the queries, and mutations your project has inside of the API Playground.

Just like we saw in the queries section, you can visit the API Playground by navigating to it from the sidebar.

Inside the API Playground, you'll start with the following:

mutation {

}

Then inside there, when you type product you'll be given a list of all mutations that relate to your Product model.

For this tutorial we'll use the updateProduct mutation to modify the product entry we previously created using the UI.

If you explore the API Docs, you'll see the typed arguments the updateProduct mutation accepts. Just hover over the mutation, and a dialog will show you some information about it, which is clickable and displays documentation on the Docs tab of the API Playground:

updateProduct mutation

You can click-through to the individual types to see what fields are necessary. For example, ProductUpdateInput will contain all of the fields that match your content model.

Let's use these types to help us write our GraphQL mutation, providing both where, and data arguments.

We'll only update the price field for our product entry.

mutation {
  updateProduct(where: { id: "<ADD_YOUR_ID_HERE>" }, data: { price: 2000 }) {
    id
    name
    price
  }
}

You should then see once you execute the operation that the product entry has been updated with the new price value.

#API Access

The last step, is to navigate to your Project settings panel to enable access to your API. You can either enable full public access to your API or protect your API with permanent auth tokens.

The default stage for the Content API is set to Published. To create the new permissions click Yes, initialize defaults in the Content API Permissions section.

Content API permissions

This will set Read permission on all models on stage Published.

Now that the API is public, let's test it. Copy your project's Content API endpoint and paste it in your URL bar for your browser. You'll find the Content API URL in Project settings > Access > Endpoints.

Content API URL

Run the query we used in the Query content section of this document once more. This is now publicly accessible on the web!

Content publicly available

#Additional resources