Protocol Buffer Compiler Containers

This repository contains the Dockerfile for generating gRPC and protobuf code for various languages, removing the need to setup protoc and the various gRPC plugins lcoally. It relies on setting a simple volume to the docker container, usually mapping the current directory to /defs, and specifying the file and language you want to generate.

Usage

Pull the container:

$ docker pull namely/protoc-all

After that, travel to the directory that contains your .proto definition files.

So if you have a directory: /Users/me/project/protobufs/ that has: myproto.proto, you'd want to do this:

cd ~/my_project/protobufs
docker run -v `pwd`:/defs namely/protoc-all -f myproto.proto -l ruby #or go, csharp, etc

The container automatically puts the compiled files into a gen directory with language-specific sub-directories. So for Golang, the files go into a directory ./gen/pb-go; For ruby the directory is ./gen/pb-ruby.

Options

You can use the -o flag to specify an output directory. This will automatically be created. For example, add -o my-gen to add all fileoutput to the my-gen directory. In this case, pb-* subdirectories will not be created.

You can use the -d flag to generate all proto files in a directory. You cannot use this with the -f option.

You can also use -i to add extra include directories. This can be helpful to lift protofiles up a directory when generating. As an example, say you have a file protorepo/catalog/catalog.proto. This will by default output to gen/pb-go/protorepo/catalog/ because protorepo is part of the file path input. To remove the protorepo you need to add an include and change the import:

$ docker run ... namely/protoc-all -i protorepo -f catalog/catalog.proto -l go
# instead of
$ docker run ... namely/protoc-all -f protorepo/catalog/catalog.proto -l go
# which will generate files in a `protorepo` directory.

gRPC Gateway (Experimental)

This repo also provides a script all/generate_gateway.sh that will generate an Docker image of a grpc-gateway for your proto. Run it locally, specifying your proto file, the name of your gRPC service (we could figure it out by parsing the proto file, but for now this is easier), and the name of the Docker container to generate.

The container is a stand-alone app that acts as an HTTP server and a gRPC client for your service. Run it with "docker run my-container --backend=grpc-service:50051", where --backend refers to your actual gRPC server's address.

grpc_cli

This repo also contains a Dockerfile for building a grpc_cli.

Run it with

docker run -v `pwd`:/defs --rm -it namely/grpc-cli call docker.for.mac.localhost:50051 \\
   LinkShortener.ResolveShortLink "short_link:'asdf'" --protofiles=link_shortener.proto

You can pass multiple files to --protofiles by separating them with commas, for example --protofiles=link_shortener.proto,foo/bar/baz.proto,biz.proto. All of the protofiles must be relative to pwd, since pwd is mounted into the container.

See the grpc_cli documentation for more information. You may find it useful to bind this to an alias:

alias grpc_cli='docker run -v `pwd`:/defs --rm -it namely/grpc-cli'

Note the use of single quotes in the alias, which avoids expanding the pwd parameter when the alias is created.

Now you can call it with

grpc_cli call docker.for.mac.localhost:50051 LinkShortener.ResolveShortLink "short_link:'asdf'" --protofiles=link_shortener.proto

Contributing

If you make changes, or add a container for another language compiler, this repo has simple scripts that can build projects. You can run the following within the all/ folder:

$ make build

This will build all of the known containers.

$ make test

This will run tests that containers can build for each language.

$ make push

This will build and push the containers to the Namely registry located on DockerHub. You must be authorized to push to this repo.

MarcosX / docker-protoc