Best practice? Making a route available only in dev/staging environments

I can confirm this is a better way! My approach got convoluted quickly and I soon switched to yours.

This approach works, but consider using a specific key in config like config :my_app, :whatever_the_feature_is_called and enabling / disabling that in files like config/test.exs etc - coupling everything to a generic “environment” option makes it harder to see what options vary per-environment.

In case anyone is searching in the future, I found another answer for this:

1. Add some kind of environment setting in your various config files (dev.exs, prod.exs, test.exs):

  config :my_app, :environment, :prod

2. In your router (and in my case, nav code in templates) you can then inspect that setting

  if Application.get_env(:my_app, :environment) in [:dev, :test] do
    ...

seems to work ok - I have checked running using mix & a release.

The Mix.env trick does not work anymore when working with a mix release build. I even tried replacing this with checking a System.get_env but it does not work since routes.ex seems to bee compiled and expanded from its macro form at compile time.

You can add this instead to your router

if Mix.env == :dev do
  forward "/graphiql",
    to: Absinthe.Plug.GraphiQL,
    init_opts: [schema: MyAppWeb.Schema]
end

That is, if you are using Mix with development environment under staging. Once you compile with prod this section will not be included on your routing.

Hope that helps

Not the answer you may be looking for but at work we just restrict the /graphiql route to users that are logged in as company admins which you can accomplish with a simple plug. Plus graphiql doesn’t really expose anything that isn’t already exposed via the GraphQL api itself.