The Graph
Overview: Why is The Graph needed?
The Graph team have prepared a highly informative video featuring an overview of the Graph protocol along with some hands-on examples you can try here. This video covers everything you need to know to build support for The Graph into your full stack application, and create subgraphs to query the relevant data.
The Graph is a permissionless and decentralized protocol for indexing and querying data from blockchains. It makes querying fast, reliable, and secure, and allows anyone to build and publish application programming interfaces (APIs) called subgraphs, which act as intermediaries; allowing applications to communicate with one another.
Prerequisites
Before you run a standalone Graph node, you will need:
- Docker: Containerization platform for software solutions.
docker-compose
: Used to automate interactions between docker containers.- JQ: JSON processor for graph requests.
In this guide, we will walk through setting up an Astar node to gain more insight into transactions on the blockchain by providing indexing data to a standalone Graph node.