twirp VS grpcurl

The next time I want to build an API, I will probably make use of https://github.com/twitchtv/twirp. I like working with Protobuf and having strongly-typed and well-defined messages, but gRPC is way, way too much. It's obviously a Google product, built for what Google needs.

Use Protobuf for messages, but just use HTTP for transport.

- Twirp (Twitch light version of gRPC, with optional JSON encoding, HTTP1 support and without streaming) - https://github.com/twitchtv/twirp

There is another: twirp

And addition to what was mentioned there are also webrpc and twirp.

If you find one, you maybe also interested in twirp.

Twitch has a great framework for it https://twitchtv.github.io/twirp/docs/intro.html

We have better experience with https://goa.design/ than with https://github.com/twitchtv/twirp

Take a look at Twirp (https://github.com/twitchtv/twirp) open sourced by TwitchTv. It's a lot lighter weight than gRPC. It does use Protobufs but addresses some of the concerns you mentioned, such as being able to test with JSON payloads, works over HTTP 1.1 and HTTP/2, good client libraries, and doesn't require a proxy.

They address your concerns in more detail in the Twirp release announcement (2018) - https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2018/01/16/twirp-a-sweet-new-rpc-f...

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.