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gRPC C++

This directory contains the C++ implementation of gRPC.

To start using gRPC C++

This section describes how to add gRPC as a dependency to your C++ project.

In the C++ world, there's no universally accepted standard for managing project dependencies. Therefore, gRPC supports several major build systems, which should satisfy most users.

Supported Platforms

  • Officially Supported: These platforms are officially supported. We follow the OSS Foundational C++ Support Policy to choose platforms to support. We test our code on these platform and have automated continuous integration tests for them. .

  • Best Effort: We do not have continous integration tests for these, but we are fairly confident that gRPC C++ would work on them. We will make our best effort to support them, and we welcome patches for such platforms, but we might need to declare bankruptcy on some issues.

  • Community Supported: These platforms are supported by contributions from the open source community, there is no official support for them. Breakages on these platforms may go unnoticed, and the community is responsible for all maintenance. Unmaintained code for these platforms may be deleted.

Operating System Architectures Versions Support Level
Linux - Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS x86, x64 clang 7+, GCC 7.3+ Officially Supported
Windows 10+ x86, x64 Visual Studio 2019+ Officially Supported
MacOS x64, ARM64 XCode 12+ Officially Supported
Linux - Others x86, x64 clang 7+, GCC 7.3+ Best Effort
Linux ARM64 Best Effort
iOS Best Effort
Android Best Effort
AIX Community Supported
Asylo Community Supported
FreeBSD Community Supported
Fuchsia Community Supported
NaCL Community Supported
NetBSD Community Supported
OpenBSD Community Supported
Solaris Community Supported

Bazel

Bazel is the primary build system used by the core gRPC development team. Bazel provides fast builds and it easily handles dependencies that support bazel.

To add gRPC as a dependency in bazel:

  1. determine commit SHA for the grpc release you want to use
  2. Use the http_archive bazel rule to include gRPC source
http_archive(
    name = "com_github_grpc_grpc",
    urls = [
        "https://github.com/grpc/grpc/archive/YOUR_GRPC_COMMIT_SHA.tar.gz",
    ],
    strip_prefix = "grpc-YOUR_GRPC_COMMIT_SHA",
)
load("@com_github_grpc_grpc//bazel:grpc_deps.bzl", "grpc_deps")
grpc_deps()
load("@com_github_grpc_grpc//bazel:grpc_extra_deps.bzl", "grpc_extra_deps")
grpc_extra_deps()

CMake

cmake is your best option if you cannot use bazel. It supports building on Linux, MacOS and Windows (official support) but also has a good chance of working on other platforms (no promises!). cmake has good support for crosscompiling and can be used for targeting the Android platform.

To build gRPC C++ from source, follow the BUILDING guide.

find_package

The canonical way to discover dependencies in CMake is the find_package command.

find_package(gRPC CONFIG REQUIRED)
add_executable(my_exe my_exe.cc)
target_link_libraries(my_exe gRPC::grpc++)

Full example

find_package can only find software that has already been installed on your system. In practice that means you'll need to install gRPC using cmake first. gRPC's cmake support provides the option to install gRPC either system-wide (not recommended) or under a directory prefix in a way that you can later easily use it with the find_package(gRPC CONFIG REQUIRED) command.

The following sections describe strategies to automatically build gRPC as part of your project.

FetchContent

If you are using CMake v3.11 or newer you should use CMake's FetchContent module. The first time you run CMake in a given build directory, FetchContent will clone the gRPC repository and its submodules. FetchContent_MakeAvailable() also sets up an add_subdirectory() rule for you. This causes gRPC to be built as part of your project.

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.15)
project(my_project)

include(FetchContent)
FetchContent_Declare(
  gRPC
  GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/grpc/grpc
  GIT_TAG        RELEASE_TAG_HERE  # e.g v1.28.0
)
set(FETCHCONTENT_QUIET OFF)
FetchContent_MakeAvailable(gRPC)

add_executable(my_exe my_exe.cc)
target_link_libraries(my_exe grpc++)

Note that you need to install the prerequisites before building gRPC.

git submodule

If you cannot use FetchContent, another approach is to add the gRPC source tree to your project as a git submodule. You can then add it to your CMake project with add_subdirectory(). Example

Support system-installed gRPC

If your project builds gRPC you should still consider the case where a user wants to build your software using a previously installed gRPC. Here's a code snippet showing how this is typically done.

option(USE_SYSTEM_GRPC "Use system installed gRPC" OFF)
if(USE_SYSTEM_GRPC)
  # Find system-installed gRPC
  find_package(gRPC CONFIG REQUIRED)
else()
  # Build gRPC using FetchContent or add_subdirectory
endif()

Full example

pkg-config

If your project does not use CMake (e.g. you're using make directly), you can first install gRPC C++ using CMake, and have your non-CMake project rely on the pkgconfig files which are provided by gRPC installation. Example

Note for CentOS 7 users

CentOS-7 ships with pkg-config 0.27.1, which has a bug that can make invocations take extremely long to complete. If you plan to use pkg-config, you'll want to upgrade it to something newer.

make (deprecated)

The default choice for building on UNIX based systems used to be make, but we are no longer recommending it. You should use bazel or cmake instead.

To install gRPC for C++ on your system using make, follow the Building gRPC C++ instructions to build from source and then install locally using make install. This also installs the protocol buffer compiler protoc (if you don't have it already), and the C++ gRPC plugin for protoc.

WARNING: After installing with make install there is no easy way to uninstall, which can cause issues if you later want to remove the grpc and/or protobuf installation or upgrade to a newer version.

Packaging systems

We do not officially support any packaging system for C++, but there are some community-maintained packages that are kept up-to-date and are known to work well. More contributions and support for popular packaging systems are welcome!

Install using vcpkg package

gRPC is available using the vcpkg dependency manager:

# install vcpkg package manager on your system using the official instructions
git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg.git
cd vcpkg

# Bootstrap on Linux:
./bootstrap-vcpkg.sh
# Bootstrap on Windows instead:
# ./bootstrap-vcpkg.bat

./vcpkg integrate install

# install gRPC using vcpkg package manager
./vcpkg install grpc

The gRPC port in vcpkg is kept up to date by Microsoft team members and community contributors. If the version is out of date, please create an issue or pull request on the vcpkg repository.

Examples & Additional Documentation

You can find out how to build and run our simplest gRPC C++ example in our C++ quick start.

For more detailed documentation on using gRPC in C++ , see our main documentation site at grpc.io, specifically:

  • Overview: An introduction to gRPC with a simple Hello World example in all our supported languages, including C++.
  • gRPC Basics - C++: A tutorial that steps you through creating a simple gRPC C++ example application.
  • Asynchronous Basics - C++: A tutorial that shows you how to use gRPC C++'s asynchronous/non-blocking APIs.

To start developing gRPC C++

For instructions on how to build gRPC C++ from source, follow the Building gRPC C++ instructions.