gRPC & Protocol Buffers

The good, the bad and the ugly

Description

This repository contains a simplistic sample book webstore project which is only serving the purpose of being a easily comprehensive practical example of a microservice architecture with gRPC and protocol buffers.

Repository structure

./proto # contains protocol buffer files
./server # contains multiple microservices delivering data

Running the project

Prerequisite is to have Docker installed and its daemon running.

docker-compose up # spins up containers and runs the project
docker-compose up -d # does the same but disattaches from logs (use docker-compose stop to stop the containers)

Sending requests to the services

BloomRPC is a great gRPC client which you can use to send requests to the services.
If you want to use another GUI or CLI client you can find a pretty complete list on the awesome-grpc list. URIs to reach those when started with docker-compose as described above are:

• localhost:50051 for author-service
• localhost:50052 for book-service

Manually generating the client libraries for node

After running the following commands the generated client libraries should be available in folder ./proto/generated/node.

cd ./proto
npm install
npm run compile