grpcurl VS protobuf-es

grpcurl

The API server will be built and start running on port 50051. You can test the functionality using a gRPC client of your choice like grpcurl or Postman.

> What is the ubiquitous utility for interacting with gRPC? We have curl for REST. What is openAPI of gRPC?

grpcurl[1] combined with gRPC server reflection[2]. The schema is compiled into the server as an encoded proto which is exposed via server reflection, which grpcurl reads to send correctly encoded requests.

[1] https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcurl

The whole idea behind the post is that accessing the gRPC service with regular tools is impossible. To test, we need a dedicated tool nonetheless. I found grpcurl. Let's install it and use it to list available services:

gRpcurl is a cool little tool to look at btw. Had to use it at my job before. Can call a gRPC via a curl like command. Regular curl doesn't support HTTP2. Had to use TLS with some tokens even. But you can reference a local .proto(gRPC protobuf file for the call) and make things easier for yourself if you hate reading instructions on command line args like I do.

A simple GRPC client built using grpcurl.

Try testing with grpcurl, using the -H or -rpc-header flags to set the appropriate header.

Yes, you can. You are mistaking protobuf with gRPC. See this for more information.

You can use this with connect: https://github.com/bufbuild/protobuf-es

Ah you should check out https://github.com/bufbuild/protobuf-es which feels great so far. Then there's connect by the same buf people but it has a grpc-web option https://connect.build/docs/web/getting-started/. The amount of code generated is also tiny, which I love.

I'd recommend looking into protobuf-ts (Timo from Buf) or protobuf-es (Buf maintained).

Not sure if it is a magic bullet, but it was definitely written by TypeScript developers, for TypeScript developers.

The generated TypeScript code is already pretty minimal because all serialization ops are implemented with reflection instead of generated code (which is only marginally slower than generated code in JS).

But you can also switch to generating JavaScript + TypeScript declaration files, which is truly minimal: JavaScript is an entire dynamic language, so we actually only generated a small snippet of metadata in the .js output, and create a class at run time with a function call. The generated typings (.d.ts) give you type safety, autocompletion in the IDE, and so on.

You can see the output here: https://github.com/bufbuild/protobuf-es/blob/main/packages/p...