[Recap] Apollo Community Meetup - Hands-On with Apollo MCP Server
Meetup Date: Wednesday, June 11, 2025
Featured Speakers:
- Matt Hawkins, Staff Software Engineer (Apollo)
- Dan Boerner, Apollo Champion (Apollo)
MCP is the hottest thing in the GraphQL space. For this meetup we wanted to help the community install and setup the MCP server so we invited Matthew Hawkins, a staff engineer at Apollo to lead the meetup. He shared a file with simple commands you can use.
git clone https://github.com/apollographql/apollo-mcp-server.git && cd apollo-mcp-server
curl -sSL https://mcp.apollo.dev/download/nix/latest | sh
code ~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
{
"mcpServers": {
"apollo": {
"command": "npx",
"args": [
"mcp-remote",
"http://127.0.0.1:5000/mcp"
]
}
}
}
Matthew then demo’d the two primary modes of integrating your graph with MCP.
-
Graph Introspection - In this model, you leverage GraphQL’s built-in ability for schema introspection. Matt shared the pros and cons of this approach (hint: there are a lot of cons)
-
Operations as Tools - In this model, you define operations (queries/mutations and even PQs) that you want to expose as tools to the LLM. Checkout the recording to learn the performance and token budget advantages of this approach.
After these demos we had a great discussion and Q&A. Checkout the recording and highlights below inline or via this direct link.
