4 min read
Overview
In the fast-paced yet often unpredictable world of Web3 engineering, teams consistently face considerable challenges when running hosted subgraphs, such as downtime, data lag, sluggish reindexes, slow queries, and the lack of direct support.
Enter Satsuma, a blockchain indexing platform with drop-in support for hosted subgraphs aimed at solving these challenges. In this guide, we'll cover how to add the Satsuma add-on to your QuickNode endpoint and then show you how to create, and deploy a subgraph using Satsuma. Let's get started!
Prefer a video walkthrough? Follow along with Radek and learn about subgraphs and how to deploy one using Satsuma in 25 minutes.
What You Will Do
- Learn about Satsuma
- Add the Satsuma add-on to your QuickNode endpoint
- Create, deploy, and manage a Subgraph using Satsuma
What You Will Need
- Basic understanding of The Graph
- Graph-CLI installed
- A QuickNode Account
| Dependency | Version |
|---|---|
| node.js | 18.13.0 |
| graph-cli | 0.49.0 |
What is Satsuma?
Satsuma is a hosted graph solution that allows developers to deploy and index subgraphs on a hosted service. Currently, if a network is not supported on The Graph's Hosted Service, you'll need to run your own graph node to index it. However, this can take extra engineering effort to set up and can be a mental burden to handle maintenance & issues. Satsuma solves this problem by allowing developers to quickly deploy subgraphs in less than 5 minutes.
Key Benefits of Satsuma
Features and key benefits of Satsuma include:
- Reliability: 99.9% API SLA and lower data lag.
- Speed: Up to 5x faster indexing and 2x faster queries.
- Support: Telegram / Slack group with a team of engineers.
- Developer tooling: Tools to save your engineering team time.
Additional features include advanced metrics & performance insights, subgraph versioning, and direct access to data in Postgres databases. In the future, Satsuma will also have support for GraphQL subscriptions and direct access to low-level decoded events.
In the next section, we'll cover how to add the Satsuma add-on to your QuickNode account and walkthrough the Satsuma dashboard.
Enable Satsuma on a QuickNode Endpoint
First, login to QuickNode (you can create a free account here), and then navigate to your endpoints. For this tutorial, you'll need an endpoint on Goerli Testnet. Create one now if you don't yet have one.
Once you have your Goerli Testnet endpoint set up, on your endpoint page, click the Add-ons tab and then click the Explore button on the Satsuma add-on. You'll see a pop-up box explaining pricing and which endpoints the add-on is compatible with. Once the add-on is enabled, you'll see it in your list of Installed Third-Party Add-Ons. With the add-on installed, click the Dashboard button to be directed to Satsuma's dashboard:
Satsuma Dashboard:
The Satsuma dashboard above lets you quickly deploy subgraphs and create query keys. Query keys are similar to authentication tokens and allow you to conduct GraphQL queries. These query keys should be a part of your URL path (e.g., https://subgraph.satsuma-prod.com/<QUERY_KEY>/<ORGANIZATION>/<SUBGRAPH_NAME>/version/<VERSION_NAME>/api) or can be apart of your header (e.g., -H 'x-api-key: <QUERY_KEY>'). See the docs for a full example. An example use case for additional query keys is you can create a query key that allows origins from your domain(s) and has no rate limit (rate limiting coming soon).
In the following section, we'll show you how to create and deploy a subgraph on Satsuma.
Add and Deploy a Subgraph with Satsuma
Now, within your Satsuma dashboard, click the Add subgraph button and you'll be prompted with a graph-cli command. With this command, we can directly deploy a subgraph and host it with Satsuma.
graph deploy example-subgraph-name \
--version-label v0.0.1-new-version \
--node https://app.satsuma.xyz/api/subgraphs/deploy \
--deploy-key <DEPLOYER_KEY>
Note - As stated before, Satsuma also supports versioning, so you can deploy different subgraphs and subgraph versions. You can have up to 5 versions which all have a version-specific endpoint along with the production static endpoint.
Upon deployment, you'll see a similiar output too:
Now, navigate to the link highlighted in green. You'll see the the Satsuma subgraph page where you have access to the Playground, GraphQL API (HTTP), and Indexing Status.
On the Playground page, you can make queries against your subgraph:
You can also use the GraphQL API (HTTP) URL to make API requests:
And check your Indexing Status:
Final Thoughts
That's it! You know now how to create, deploy and manage your own subgraph using Satsuma. If you want to learn more, check out the following list of resources:
- Satsuma Docs
- Guide: How to Create and Deploy a Custom Subgraph with The Graph
- QuickNode / Satsuma Marketplace Add-on
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