Advance golang course: Protobuf and gRPC

What is this project?

This is the documentation for my Golang gRPC project. This project is part of my learning process of golang and gRPC. To understand microservices.

What is a protocol buffer?

Protocol buffers are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages.

Official documentation: https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers

What is gRPC?

gRPC is a modern, open source, high-performance remote procedure call (RPC) framework

Official documentation: https://grpc.io/docs/

Before staring

Install protoc compiler (version 3.13.0)

# Linux
apt install -y protobuf-compiler
protoc --version 

# Or MacOS
brew install protobuf
protoc --version 

Install protoc-gen-go and protoc-gen-go-grpc

go install google.golang.org/protobuf/cmd/protoc-gen-go@latest  
go install google.golang.org/grpc/cmd/protoc-gen-go-grpc@latest

Install protobuf and gRPC dependencies

go get google.golang.org/protobuf
go get google.golang.org/grpc

Install postgres driver

go get github.com/lib/pq

To start

Compile the proto file to golang code using protoc

Here are two different ways to compile the proto file to golang code

This command will generate the golang code for the proto file,

example: student.pb.go and student_grpc.pb.go in the proto folder or test.pb.go and test_grpc.pb.go in the proto folder

Student proto file: studentpb/student.studentpb

protoc --go_out=. --go_opt=paths=source_relative --go-grpc_out=. --go-grpc_opt=paths=source_relative studentpb/student.proto

Test proto file: testpb/test.testpb

protoc --go_out=. --go_opt=paths=source_relative --go-grpc_out=. --go-grpc_opt=paths=source_relative testpb/test.proto

Or you can run this script to compile all the proto files in the proto folder

./compile-proto-files.sh studentpb/student.proto testpb/test.proto

• --go_out is the output path for the generated golang code
• --go_opt is the option for the generated golang code
• --go-grpc_out is the output path for the generated golang code
• --go-grpc_opt is the option for the generated golang code
• name/name.proto is the path to the proto file

Run DockerFile to build the postgres db

cd database
docker build -t github-thrashy-grpc .

Deploy the postgres db

docker run -d -p 54321:5432 --name postgres-grpc github-thrashy-grpc

Run the server

go run server-student/main.go