Lesson

Extracting your schema

Learn how to extract your Sanity Studio schema into a JSON file. This is a crucial step before generating TypeScript types. This file, a static representation of your data's shape, will be used for type generation.

Before generating TypeScript types, you need to extract the Sanity Studio schema written in JavaScript into a static representation, a JSON file describing the shape of the data your Sanity Studio produces.

Run the following Sanity CLI command in your studio project folder:

Terminal

npx sanity schema extract

Run sanity schema extract in the Studio project from your terminal

If your command ran successfully, you should see a new file called schema.json in your Studio project folder. In this course, you will only use this file for the type generation; you don’t need to do anything else with it.

If you explore its content, you will find your Studio schema described in a JSON format. For example, the document type for venue will look something like this:

schema.json

{
  "name": "venue",
  "type": "document",
  "attributes": {
    "_id": {
      "type": "objectAttribute",
      "value": {
        "type": "string"
      }
    },
    "_type": {
      "type": "objectAttribute",
      "value": {
        "type": "string",
        "value": "venue"
      }
    },
    "_createdAt": {
      "type": "objectAttribute",
      "value": {
        "type": "string"
      }
    },
    "_updatedAt": {
      "type": "objectAttribute",
      "value": {
        "type": "string"
      }
    },
    "_rev": {
      "type": "objectAttribute",
      "value": {
        "type": "string"
      }
    },
    "name": {
      "type": "objectAttribute",
      "value": {
        "type": "string"
      },
      "optional": true
    },
    "city": {
      "type": "objectAttribute",
      "value": {
        "type": "string"
      },
      "optional": true
    },
    "country": {
      "type": "objectAttribute",
      "value": {
        "type": "string"
      },
      "optional": true
    }
  }
}

This file can be used to develop tooling that needs to know about a Sanity Studio schema. But in this course, you will use it to generate TypeScript types.

Typed content with Sanity TypeGen

Extracting your schema