PHP Protobuf Example

A minimal example demonstrating the use of a Slim4 server responding to a request using protocol buffers (protobuf). The purpose of this codebase was just to prove the concept, and to have the smallest possible solution I was comfortable with to prove that protobufs could be a viable solution to RESTful APIs that I often develop using the Slim framework. The entire PHP codebase (that was non-generated from the proto file, or from packages), is a single index.php file less than 50 lines long.

Getting Started

Generate Protobuf Types

In order to use this codebase, you will need to have the protobuf compiler, for it to generate the types from the .proto file in the codebase.

On Debian/Ubuntu, you will probably be able to install this by running:

sudo apt install protobuf-compiler

Once you have the compiler installed, use the following command from within the src/ directory to generate the types:

protoc \
  --php_out=. \
  MyApplication.proto

Install Packages

Install the requires packages using composer (installation tutorial) by navigating to the src/ directory and running:

composer install

Run The Codebase

Now you can run the code using the built-in webserver with:

php -S localhost:8080 index.php

When you navigate to localhost:8080 in your browser, you should see the raw output of the protobuf message. You can flip the switch inside src/index.php to change it to return the output in normal JSON form to demonstrate the difference.