protoc-ts-es2015

A small protoc plugin that generates idomatic TypeScript/ES2015 protobuf wrappers.

Compiling Protobuf Files

The following example will compile all files of the form ./src/proto/*.proto and create the corresponding files (in the same /src/proto/ directory):

• xxx_pb.js
• xxx_pb.d.ts (via the ts-protoc-gen plugin)
• xxx_es2015.ts (via this plugin)

npm install protoc-ts-es2015

PROTOC_GEN_TS=$(which protoc-gen-ts || echo "./node_modules/.bin/protoc-gen-ts")
PROTOC_GEN_TS_ES2015=$(which protoc-gen-ts-es2015 || echo "./node_modules/.bin/protoc-gen-ts-es2015")

protoc \
    --plugin="protoc-gen-ts=$PROTOC_GEN_TS" \
    --plugin="protoc-gen-ts-es2015=$PROTOC_GEN_TS_ES2015" \
    --js_out="import_style=commonjs,binary:./" \
    --ts_out="./" \
    --ts-es2015_out="./" \
    ./src/proto/*.proto

Example Usage

Given the following .proto file,

message User {
    uint64 id = 1;
    string name = 2;
    string email = 3;
}

the following TypeScript code would work:

import {User} from "./user_es2015";

function printUser(user: User) {
  const {id, name, email} = user;
  console.log(`User ${name} has id ${id} and can be reached at ${email}.`);
}

const user = new User();
user.id = 123;
user.name = "Jane Doe";
user.email = "janedoe@example.com";
printUser(user);

To Do

There's no support for nested messages yet. I'm also not sure how this would be implemented in a context like gRPC where we don't have direct control over how the messages are deserialized. We also need to override the deserialize methods.