davalpargal / stencil

Stencil is a Protobuf schema registry that enables you to create, maintain and consume protobuf messages and APIs dynamically, efficiently, and reliably.

Stencil

Stencil is dynamic schema registry for protobuf. Protobuf is a Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data. The challenge with using generated source code from protobuf is that for every change in proto definition, it requires to recompile dependent services/packages. This approach works for most applications but it's difficult for general purpose applications that needs to operate on arbitrary protobuf schemas. Stencil enables the developers to specifically tackle this problem.

To work with arbitrary proto schema, application need to load proto schema definition at runtime. Protobuf allows you to define a whole proto file using google.protobuf.FileDescriptorProto. A google.protobuf.FileDescriptorSet contains list of FileDescriptorProtos. protoc can generate descriptorset file from proto files. Stencil heavily make use of this feature to update proto schemas in runtime.

Key Features

Discover why users choose Stencil as their main schema registry

• Version history Stencil stores versioned history of proto descriptor file on specified namespace and name
• Backward compatibility enforce backward compatability check on upload by default
• Flexbility ability to skip some of the backward compatability checks while upload
• Descriptor fetch ability to download proto descriptor files
• Metadata provides metadata API to retrieve latest version number given a name and namespace
• Clients in multiple languages Stencil provides clients in GO, JAVA, JS languages to interact with Stencil server and deserialize messages using dynamic schema

Usage

Explore the following resources to get started with Stencil:

• Documentation provides guidance on using stencil.
• Server provides details on getting started with stencil server.
• Clients provides reference to supported stencil clients.

Clients

• Java
• Go
• Javascript

Contribute

Development of Stencil happens in the open on GitHub, and we are grateful to the community for contributing bugfixes and improvements. Read below to learn how you can take part in improving stencil.

Read our contributing guide to learn about our development process, how to propose bugfixes and improvements, and how to build and test your changes to stencil.

To help you get your feet wet and get you familiar with our contribution process, we have a list of good first issues that contain bugs which have a relatively limited scope. This is a great place to get started.

Credits

This project exists thanks to all the contributors.

License

Stencil is Apache 2.0 licensed.