protobuild

Build protobufs in Go, easily.

protobuild works by scanning the go package in a project and emitting correct protoc commands, configured with the plugins, packages and details of your choice.

The main benefit is that it makes it much easier to consume external types from vendored projects. By integrating the protoc include paths with Go's vendoring and GOPATH, builds are much easier to keep consistent across a project.

This comes from experience with generating protobufs with go generate in swarmkit and the tool used with containerd. It should replace both.

Status

Very early stages.

Installation

To ensure easy use with builds, we'll try to support go get. Install with the following command:

go get -u github.com/containerd/protobuild

Usage

Protobuild works by providing a list of Go packages in which to build the protobufs. To get started with a project, you must do the following:

1. Create a Protobuild.toml file in the root of your Go project. Use the example as a starting point.

2. Make sure that the packages where you want your protobuf files have a Go file in place. Usually, adding a doc.go file is sufficient. A package for protobuf should look like this:

   foo.proto
   doc.go
   

   Where the contents of doc.go will have a package declaration in it. See the example for details. Make sure the package name corresponds to what is in the go_package option.

3. Run the protobuild command:

   go list ./... | grep -v vendor | xargs protobuild
   

Version Compatibility

Originally protoc-gen-go was supporting gRPC through its plugins mechanism. However gRPC support is later extracted as protoc-gen-go-gprc binary.

To use protoc-gen-go and protoc-gen-go-grpc. Please specify version = "2" and both code generators instead of plugins like below.

version = "2"
generators = ["go", "go-grpc"]

Project details

protobuild is a containerd sub-project, licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. As a containerd sub-project, you will find the:

• Project governance,
• Maintainers,
• and Contributing guidelines

information in our containerd/project repository.