Output Formats

All CLI commands support four output formats via the --format flag.

Human (default)

Colorized, human-readable output with source context:

✗ Validation error in src/queries.graphql:5:3
  Cannot query field "invalidField" on type "User"

  3 |   user(id: $id) {
  4 |     id
  5 |     invalidField
    |     ^^^^^^^^^^^^
  6 |   }

✓ 12 files validated, 1 error found

JSON

Machine-readable JSON for CI/CD pipelines and custom tooling:

graphql check --format json

The check command emits an object with per-file errors and warnings arrays and a unified stats block:

{
  "success": false,
  "schema_loaded": true,
  "files": [
    {
      "file": "src/queries.graphql",
      "errors": [
        {
          "message": "Cannot query field \"invalidField\" on type \"User\"",
          "severity": "error",
          "source": "validation",
          "rule": null,
          "location": {
            "start": { "line": 5, "column": 3 },
            "end": { "line": 5, "column": 15 }
          }
        }
      ],
      "warnings": []
    }
  ],
  "stats": {
    "total_files": 1,
    "total_errors": 1,
    "total_warnings": 0,
    "validation_errors": 1,
    "lint_errors": 0
  }
}

GitHub

GitHub Actions annotation format — errors and warnings appear as inline annotations on pull requests:

graphql validate --format github

::error file=src/queries.graphql,line=5,col=3,endLine=5,endColumn=15::Cannot query field "invalidField" on type "User"

See CI/CD Integration for a full GitHub Actions workflow.

SARIF

SARIF (Static Analysis Results Interchange Format) for GitHub code scanning integration. Enables rich PR annotations and populates the Security tab:

graphql check --format sarif > results.sarif

{
  "$schema": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/oasis-tcs/sarif-spec/main/sarif-2.1/schema/sarif-schema-2.1.0.json",
  "version": "2.1.0",
  "runs": [
    {
      "tool": {
        "driver": {
          "name": "graphql-analyzer",
          "rules": [{ "id": "noAnonymousOperations", "shortDescription": { "text": "..." } }]
        }
      },
      "results": [
        {
          "ruleId": "noAnonymousOperations",
          "level": "error",
          "message": { "text": "All operations must be named" },
          "locations": [
            {
              "physicalLocation": {
                "artifactLocation": { "uri": "src/queries.graphql" },
                "region": { "startLine": 1, "startColumn": 1 }
              }
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Upload to GitHub code scanning:

- run: graphql check -f sarif > results.sarif
- uses: github/codeql-action/upload-sarif@v3
  with:
    sarif_file: results.sarif

See CI/CD Integration for a full workflow example.