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gRPC Introduction

gRPC is a popular RPC framework open-sourced by Google, and based on an internal system developed there named "Stubby". It is based on Protocol Buffers, Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral extensible mechanism for serializing structured data.

Ent supports the automatic generation of gRPC services from schemas using a plugin available in ent/contrib.

On a high-level, the integration between Ent and gRPC works like this:

  • A command-line (or code-gen hook) named entproto is used to generate protocol buffer definitions and gRPC service definitions from an ent schema. The schema is annotated using entproto annotations to assist the mapping between the domains.
  • A protoc (protobuf compiler) plugin, protoc-gen-entgrpc, is used to generate an implementation of the gRPC service definition generated by entproto that uses the project's ent.Client to read and write from the database.
  • A gRPC server that embeds the generated service implementation is written by the developer.

In this tutorial we will build a fully working gRPC server using the Ent/gRPC integration.

Code​

The final code for this tutorial can be found in rotemtam/ent-grpc-example.