Update on Go 1.24 tool dependencies Go 1.24 introduced the -tool flag to go get and the tool stanza to go.mod. This makes tool dependencies an excellent way to manage protobuf plugins. I have rewritten this post with that in mind. Background When working with Protobuf and gRPC, one of the first things that you as a user has to figure out is how to generate code from your Protobuf definitions....
Ever since I first started using gRPC in 2016, I’ve been interested in learning how to use it well with browser clients. It’s a common question to ask once you’ve decided that you are going to use gRPC for service-to-service and mobile app communication. Here’s this great technology that abstracts away the problems I was having when making RPC calls between my services. How do I use it for my front-end applications?...
gRPC 1.0 was released in August 2016 and has since grown to become one of the premier technical solutions for application communications. It has been adopted by startups, enterprise companies, and open source projects worldwide. Its support for polyglot environments, focus on performance, type safety, and developer productivity has transformed the way developers design their architectures. So far the benefits have largely only been available to mobile app and backend developers, whilst frontend developers have had to continue to rely on JSON REST interfaces as their primary means of information exchange....
Introduction Best practices for performing client authentication with gRPC is a question that comes up again and again, so I thought I’d dive into a few different methods for performing authentication, using the tools provided by the Go gRPC packages. Today we’ll explore 3 methods of authentication: TLS Client certificate authentication Token Header authentication HTTP Basic authentication For the TL:DR; check the example repo. Note: Go-gRPC interceptors are being redesigned, so if you implement this in your server today, you may want to keep in mind that it will change again in the future....
Introduction It’s often said that gRPC is tied to the Google Protocol Buffers payload format, but this is not strictly true. While the default format for gRPC payloads is Protobuf, the gRPC-Go implementation exposes a Codec interface which allows arbitrary payload encoding. This could be used for all kinds of things, like your own binary format, using flatbuffers, or, as we shall see today, using JSON for requests and responses....
How to best handle errors in Go is a divisive issue, leading to opinion pieces by illustrious bloggers such as Dave Cheney, the commander himself Rob Pike as well as the official Go blog. I’m not going to tackle those opinions here, instead I’m going to talk about best practices for errors when using gRPC and Go. The gRPC Status package The Go gRPC implementation has a status package which exposes a nice simple interface for creating rich gRPC errors....
Introduction In the Go protobuf ecosystem there are two major implementations to choose from. There’s the official golang/protobuf, which uses reflection to marshal and unmarshal structs, and there’s gogo/protobuf, a third party implementation that leverages type-specific marshalling code for extra performance, and has many cool extensions you can use to customize the generated code. gogo/protobuf has been recommended as the best choice of Go serialization library in a large test of different implementations....
In a previous post I introduced my open source project to bring GopherJS bindings to Improbable’s gRPC-Web client. I’m happy to say that the initial goal of supporting all features of the gRPC-Web client has been completed. I was initially going to leave it at that and wait for client side streaming to land in the WHATWG Streams API Standard, and subsequently added to the official grpc-web spec and probably the gRPC-Web client, but then I was sitting at the GolangUK conference and I had a brain wave....
One of the gotchas of using gRPC is that it was not designed to transport large messages in one chunk. The default max message size is slightly arbitrarily set at 4MB today, and while it is possible to configure, that kind of behaviour might lead to a slippery slope scenario of ever increasing max message sizes. So what do we do when the message size is too large? We chunk the data into smaller pieces and stream it, using the gRPC streaming methods, naturally....
Sometimes when you’re writing a server, you’ve got a function that consumes a lot of memory while running, or some other resource, and you might be worrying that a sudden burst of requests could crash the server, since gRPC by default will just spawn another goroutine to handle any incoming requests, oblivious to the danger. In these situations, it can be useful to implement some custom request throttling. Here I’ll show an easy way to accomplish this with the use of a Go channel....