Apollo Server v5 has very few breaking API changes. It is a small upgrade focused largely on adjusting which versions of Node.js and Express are supported.
Read our migration guide for more details on how to update your app.
graphql library older than v16.11.0. (Apollo Server 4 supports graphql v16.6.0 or later.) Upgrade graphql before upgrading Apollo Server.@apollo/server/express4, or you could import it from the separate package @as-integrations/express4. In Apollo Server 5, you must import it from the separate package. You can migrate your server to the new package before upgrading to Apollo Server 5. (You can also use @as-integrations/express5 for a middleware that works with Express 5.)fetch implementation for HTTP requests by default, instead of the node-fetch npm package. If your server uses an HTTP proxy to make HTTP requests, you need to configure it in a slightly different way. See the migration guide for details.startStandaloneServer no longer uses Express. This is mostly invisible, but it does set slightly fewer headers. If you rely on the fact that this server is based on Express, you should explicitly use the Express middleware.@defer and @stream (which requires using a pre-release version of graphql v17) now explicitly only works with version 17.0.0-alpha.2 of graphql. Note that this supports the same incremental delivery protocol implemented by Apollo Server 4, which is not the same protocol in the latest alpha version of graphql. As this support is experimental, we may switch over from "only alpha.2 is supported" to "only a newer alpha or final release is supported, with a different protocol" during the lifetime of Apollo Server 5.variables map for a variable declared in the operation as a String) with a 400 status code, indicating a client error. This is also the behavior of Apollo Server 3. Apollo Server 4 mistakenly responds to these requests with a 200 status code by default; we recommended the use of the status400ForVariableCoercionErrors: true option to restore the intended behavior. That option now defaults to true.precomputedNonce option to landing page plugins (which was only non-deprecated for 8 days) has been removed.There are a few other small changes in v5:
#8076 5b26558 Thanks @valters! - Fix some error logs to properly call logger.error or logger.warn with this set. This fixes errors or crashes from logger implementations that expect this to be set properly in their methods.
#7515 100233a Thanks @trevor-scheer! - ApolloServerPluginSubscriptionCallback now takes a fetcher argument, like the usage and schema reporting plugins. The default value is Node's built-in fetch.
Updated dependencies [100233a]:
Fetched April 11, 2026