---
title: "Migrating from Apollo Tooling to GraphQL Codegen at Yelp"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/migrating-from-apollo-tooling-to-graphql-codegen-at-yelp-hmm67xphw
source_url: https://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2026/07/migrating-to-graphql-codegen.html
type: article
source: "Yelp Engineering"
published: 2026-07-17T00:16:47.371Z
updated: 2026-08-24T06:54:06.373Z
tags: ["general-programming", "typescript", "graphql"]
reading_time: 13
upvotes: 0
comments: 1
language: en
---

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# Migrating from Apollo Tooling to GraphQL Codegen at Yelp

**[Yelp Engineering](https://daily.dev/sources/yelp)** · 13 min read · 0 upvotes · 1 comments

## Summary

Yelp's Client Data team migrated their frontend React monorepo from the deprecated apollo-tooling to GraphQL Codegen, touching 500+ packages and thousands of generated files without requiring any developer to change their own code. The team chose a transparent migration strategy — configuring GraphQL Codegen to produce output identical to apollo-tooling's (same file names, nested type names, inlined enums) rather than adopting the new tool's defaults. They initially forked and patched GraphQL Codegen plugins to match the required output format and fix a concurrency issue in large monorepos, then collaborated with the GraphQL Codegen maintainers to upstream those changes into the official v6.0.0 release. An incremental 'divide and conquer' approach — maintaining a shrinking list of packages still on the old codegen — allowed continuous progress and early feedback. The result is a cleaner dependency tree, simpler build tooling, and an officially supported migration path that now benefits the wider GraphQL community.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2026/07/migrating-to-graphql-codegen.html>

## Community discussion

Top comments from developers on daily.dev.

**@pdfopsdev** · 0 upvotes

> the concurrent-generation race on shared fragments is such an underrated monorepo footgun, hit basically the same thing with a codegen step running per-workspace across parallel CI shards and just got flaky garbage output. patch-package instead of a hard fork for the plugin fixes is the right call too, way less to maintain once you can drop it for v6.

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---

Tags: [#general-programming](https://daily.dev/tags/general-programming), [#typescript](https://daily.dev/tags/typescript), [#graphql](https://daily.dev/tags/graphql)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/migrating-from-apollo-tooling-to-graphql-codegen-at-yelp-hmm67xphw)