Will Apollo play nice with (or negate) proxies?

apollo
1

Some services are only accessible within certain networks. To use my case as an example, a public library has licensed subscriptions to EBSCOhost, Freegal, 3M, Overdrive, Zinio, Flipster, Hoopla, and other e-resources. In order for library card holders to access those services from home, their requests are sent through EZProxy so that the services can verify that they are in fact allowed to access the content.

If I understand correctly, the Apollo Server would handle the transactions of any requests to those APIs. Those requests would come from our server (with the license) and therefore we won’t need to worry about using a proxy with each search on the external APIs. I’m just posting to the forums as a sanity check. Is this correct?

(We’ll still use a proxy if they want to go to the external service directly, I believe.)

I think there are perhaps other devs/users who might have proxy+Apollo questions and y’all should feel free to discuss them in this thread.

2

@wray Can you clarify where in this setup you would be using apollo server? Are you building a new app through which people can access some of these services that they are currently using a proxy for?

3

Not yet. I’m clarifying first.

I think Apollo would handle aggregating search results from multiple services that we have API connections to. After clarifying with our other dev, I’m realizing that the proxy isn’t involved with those API requests—making this thread moot perhaps. So yes, you nailed it. In cases where we don’t have an API we can search on, I guess we’d keep doing what we’re doing: linking people to those services through a proxy link where they sign in with their library card.

Thanks for writing back to talk about hypotheticals.