gRPC-web without envoy!

This project allows for the use of Google's gRPC-web npm package without implicitly requiring that one also use envoy alongside it.

PREREQUISITES

Standalone CLI tools for the most part.

As for your package manager, obviously this all depends on OS.
for Mac developers, just use Homebrew for everything.
for Linux devs, you can easily use apt & npm together to get all necessary CLI tools and packages.
for Windows devs
^{...just admit batch and PowerShell are doo-doo and install WSL2}

GETTING STARTED

This is the barebones installation process which I went through to configure my application environment correctly.

1. Install Dependencies

MacOS via Homebrew

• $ brew install protobuf
• $ brew install protoc-gen-grpc-web

Windows WITH WSL / MSYS2
and LINUX (Tested: Debian 11.3)

the -g tag is used liberally here in order to do our best to guarantee that the package executable will end up referenced within the user $PATH variable.

• $ npm install protoc-gen-grpc-web -g _{(does this have to be Global or not?)}
• $ npm install google-protobuf -g
• $ npm install grpc-web -g

2. Install Required Go Packages

• $ go get -u google.golang.org/grpc
• $ go get -u github.com/golang/protobuf/protoc-gen-go

3. Generate protobuf

• $ protoc -I proto proto/*.proto --proto_path=./proto --go_out=plugins=grpc:./backend/proto
• $ protoc -I proto proto/*.proto --js_out=import_style=commonjs:./frontend/proto --grpc-web_out=import_style=commonjs,mode=grpcwebtext:./frontend/proto

DEPLOYMENT

here we discuss how to deploy the webserver frontend via npm, as well as the Golang based backend.

FRONTEND

required npm packages & minimum versions (alongside Sveltekit obviously)

• "google-protobuf": "^3.11.3",
• "grpc-web": "^1.0.7"

Example Deployment

example of FRONTEND deployment, with an output folder named as specified and utilized in the previous sections.

$ cd frontend
$ npm install
$ npm run dev

BACKEND

Backend setup is very easy, but somewhat limited in functionality at the moment.

$ cd backend
$ go run server.go