Creating a Client

A major advantage to Protobuf (and gRPC) is the ability to generate language bindings reliably and dependably.

The main gRPC site has tutorials for generating clients in many languages:

There is also an expansive ecosystem, so plenty of languages are supported.

Tooling

In general, there are two main components to generating a language binding:

  • protoc: The protobuf compiler which call the language-specific generator
    • typically installed via a package manager (apt, yum, brew, etc)
  • protoc-gen-{language}: The language-specific generator
    • typically installed with the language’s dependency manager, build tool, etc

Generating

Regardless of language, client generation generally follows a pattern of:

$ protoc {includes} {lang-opts} {output-opts} {inputs}

We are primarily concerned with the {includes} and {inputs} bits. The rest of the options are up to you.

The .proto files used as inputs can be found in: cloudvision-apis repo. You should first clone (or download) that repository. Once you have it, generating a client is as simple as:

$ export CVAPIS=/some/path/to/cloudvision-apis
$ git clone https://github.com/aristanetworks/cloudvision-apis $CVAPIS
$ protoc -I $CVAPIS \
    {language-specific options go here} \
    $CVAPIS/arista/example.v1/example.proto $CVAPIS/arista/example.v1/services.gen.proto

In the above examples we generate the protobuf bindings (example.proto) as well as the gRPC services (services.gen.go) in the same command. You are free to do them separately, however, different language generators handle this differently.