rover

This skill is a usage guide for the Apollo Rover CLI, the official command-line tool for Apollo GraphOS. It addresses the everyday friction of managing GraphQL schemas and federation: publishing and fetching subgraph or monograph schemas, composing supergraphs locally or via GraphOS, running local supergraph development, and validating schema changes with check and lint commands before they reach production. It also emphasizes an agent-friendly schema-exploration pattern that keeps large SDL out of the agent's context.

Capabilities documented include installation across macOS/Linux/Windows (official install scripts and npm), interactive and API-key authentication, environment/profile configuration, and the core command set: subgraph publish/check/fetch/introspect, supergraph compose, rover dev, and graph publish. A notable feature is the schema exploration workflow for agents: fetch the API schema with `rover graph fetch` and pipe it into `rover schema describe` or `rover schema search` to answer 'what is in this graph?' or find a field without flooding context. Configuration coverage extends to APOLLO_KEY/APOLLO_GRAPH_REF variables, CI/CD examples for GitHub Actions and CircleCI, telemetry opt-out, proxy, and TLS settings.

Target users are GraphQL platform engineers, backend developers working in federated architectures, and CI/CD authors who publish and validate schemas, as well as AI agents performing schema discovery. Typical use cases are publishing a subgraph from a file or introspection, checking schema changes against production traffic in a PR gate, composing and running a supergraph locally, and exploring an existing graph's schema.