Multi-protocol Support

gRPC/gRPC-Web/Connect

The multi-protocol support is based on ConnectRPC. So with FauxRPC, you get gRPC, gRPC-Web and Connect out of the box.

REST

FauxRPC does a little bit more than gRPC-based protocols. It allows you to use google.api.http annotations to present a JSON/HTTP API, so you can gRPC and REST together! This is normally done with an additional service that runs in-between the outside world and your actual gRPC service but with FauxRPC you get the so-called transcoding from HTTP/JSON to gRPC all in the same package. Here’s a concrete example:

syntax = "proto3";

package http.service;

import "google/api/annotations.proto";

service HTTPService {
  rpc GetMessage(GetMessageRequest) returns (Message) {
    option (google.api.http) = {get: "/v1/{name=messages/*}"};
  }
}
message GetMessageRequest {
  string name = 1; // Mapped to URL path.
}
message Message {
  string text = 1; // The resource content.
}

Again, we start the service by building the descriptors and using

$ buf build ./httpservice.proto -o ./httpservice.binpb
$ fauxrpc run --schema=httpservice.binpb

Now that we have the server running we can test this with the “normal” curl:

$ curl http://127.0.0.1:6660/v1/messages/123456
{"text":"Retro."}⏎

Sweet. You can now easily support REST alongside gRPC. If you are wondering how to do this with “real” services, look into vanguard-go. This library is doing the real heavy lifting.

More documentation on the google.http.api annotations can be found on Google’s Transcoding Documentation, the google/api/http.proto file and the gRPC-Gateway documentation site.

Inputs Workflow