wasilibs / go-protoc-gen-grpc

Code generator plugins for default grpc languages buildable with Go

go-protoc-gen-grpc

go-protoc-gen-grpc is a distribution of the official gRPC protoc generation plugins from grpc/grpc (this is not to be confused with protoc-gen-grpc-go, the compiler for generating Go gRPC stubs, which also happens to be written in Go). It does not actually reimplement any functionality of gRPC in Go, instead compiling the original source code to WebAssembly, and executing with the pure Go Wasm runtime wazero. This means that go install or go run can be used to execute it, with no need to rely on external package managers such as Homebrew, on any platform that Go supports.

Installation

Precompiled binaries are available in the releases. Alternatively, install the plugin you want using go install.

$ go install github.com/wasilibs/go-protoc-gen-grpc/cmd/protoc-gen-grpc_python@latest

As long as $GOPATH/bin, e.g. ~/go/bin is on the PATH, you can use it with protoc as normal.

$ protoc --grpc_python_out=out/python -Iprotos protos/helloworld.proto

Note that the filenames of binaries in this repository match protoc conventions so --plugin is not needed.

For buf users, to avoid installation entirely, it can be convenient to use go run in buf.gen.yaml.

version: v1
plugins:
  - plugin: grpc_python
    out: out/python
    path: ["go", "run", "github.com/wasilibs/go-protoc-gen-grpc/cmd/protoc-gen-grpc_python@latest"]

If also using go-protoc-gen-builtins for generating the non-gRPC protobuf stubs, and invoking buf with go run, it is possible to have full protobuf/gRPC generation with no installation of tools, besides Go itself, on any platform that Go supports. The above examples use @latest, but it is recommended to specify a version, in which case all of the developers on your codebase will use the same version of the tool with no special steps.

See a full example in go-protoc-gen-builtins. To generate protos, enter the directory and run go run github.com/bufbuild/buf/cmd/buf@v1.28.1 generate. As long as your machine has Go installed, you will be able to generate protos. The first time using go run for a command, Go automatically builds it making it slower, but subsequent invocations should be quite fast.