Pure JavaScript gRPC Client

Installation

Node 12 is recommended. The exact set of compatible Node versions can be found in the engines field of the package.json file.

npm install @grpc/grpc-js

Documentation

Documentation specifically for the @grpc/grpc-js package is currently not available. However, documentation is available for the grpc package, and the two packages contain mostly the same interface. There are a few notable differences, however, and these differences are noted in the "Migrating from grpc" section below.

Features

• Clients
• Automatic reconnection
• Servers
• Streaming
• Metadata
• Partial compression support: clients can decompress response messages
• Pick first and round robin load balancing policies
• Client Interceptors
• Connection Keepalives
• HTTP Connect support (proxies)

If you need a feature from the grpc package that is not provided by the @grpc/grpc-js, please file a feature request with that information.

This library does not directly handle .proto files. To use .proto files with this library we recommend using the @grpc/proto-loader package.

Migrating from grpc

@grpc/grpc-js is almost a drop-in replacement for grpc, but you may need to make a few code changes to use it:

• If you are currently loading .proto files using grpc.load, that function is not available in this library. You should instead load your .proto files using @grpc/proto-loader and load the resulting package definition objects into @grpc/grpc-js using grpc.loadPackageDefinition.
• If you are currently loading packages generated by grpc-tools, you should instead generate your files using the generate_package_definition option in grpc-tools, then load the object exported by the generated file into @grpc/grpc-js using grpc.loadPackageDefinition.
• If you have a server and you are using Server#bind to bind ports, you will need to use Server#bindAsync instead.

Some Notes on API Guarantees

The public API of this library follows semantic versioning, with some caveats:

• Some methods are prefixed with an underscore. These methods are internal and should not be considered part of the public API.
• The class Call is only exposed due to limitations of TypeScript. It should not be considered part of the public API.
• In general, any API that is exposed by this library but is not exposed by the grpc library is likely an error and should not be considered part of the public API.
• The grpc.experimental namespace contains APIs that have not stabilized. Any API in that namespace may break in any minor version update.