ts-grpc-protoc-gen

Protoc Plugin for generating TypeScript Declarations for gRPC

This repository contains a protoc plugin that generates TypeScript declarations (.d.ts files) that match the JavaScript output of protoc --js_out=import_style=commonjs,binary --grpc_out. This plugin depends on ts-protoc-gen to also be run.

This plugin is tested and written using TypeScript 2.7.

Installation

• Install the standard C++ implementation of protocol buffers from developers.google.com/protocol-buffers
• Install this package using npm, eg: npm install grpc-ts-protoc-gen or clone, install and build this repository.

Usage

As mention above, this plugin for protoc serves two purposes:

1. Generating gRPC TypeScript Definitions for CommonJS modules generated by protoc

Generating TypeScript Definitions for CommonJS modules generated by protoc

By default, protoc will generate ES5 code when the --js_out flag is used (see javascript compiler documentation). You have the choice of two module syntaxes, CommonJS or closure. This plugin (ts-grpc-protoc-gen) can be used to generate Typescript definition files (.d.ts) to provide type hints for CommonJS modules only.

To generate TypeScript definitions you must first configure protoc to use this plugin and then specify where you want the TypeScript definitions to be written to using the --grpc-ts_out flag.

PROTOC_GEN_TS_PATH="./node_modules/.bin/protoc-gen-ts"
PROTOC_GEN_GRPC_PATH=""
# Path to this plugin
PROTOC_GEN_GRPC_TS_PATH="./node_modules/bin/protoc-gen-grpc-ts"

# Directory to write generated code to (.js and .d.ts files) 
OUT_DIR="./generated"

protoc \
    --plugin="protoc-gen-ts=${PROTOC_GEN_TS_PATH}" \
    --plugin="protoc-gen-grpc=${PROTOC_GEN_GRPC_PATH}"
    --plugin="protoc-gen-grpc-ts=${PROTOC_GEN_GRPC_TS_PATH}" \
    --js_out="import_style=commonjs,binary:${OUT_DIR}" \
    --ts_out="${OUT_DIR}" \
    --grpc_out="${OUT_DIR}" \
    --grpc-ts_out="${OUT_DIR}" \
    users.proto base.proto

In the above example, the generated folder will contain both .js and .d.ts files which you can reference in your TypeScript project to get full type completion and make use of ES6-style import statements, eg:

import grpc from "grpc";
import { GetUserRequest } from "../generated/users_pb";
import { UserServiceClient } from "../generated/users_grpc_pb";

const client = new UserServiceClient('localhost', grpc.credentials.createInsecure());
const req = new GetUserRequest();
req.setUsername("johndoe");
client.getUser(req, (err, user) => { /* ... */ });

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please refer to CONTRIBUTING.md for more information.