lukaschoebel / grpc-service

Weather microservice based on the gRPC protocol

GRPC Microservice Demo

This is an example service to get comfortable with building a microservice based on the gRPC protocol and Protocol Buffers.

Background

As an alternative to the common JSON format, Protocol Buffers are a condensed data format which support gRPC calls. Compared to REST(ful) APIs which uses HTTP 1.1, the gRPC protocol utilizes faster and safer HTTP 2 calls. While REST APIs provide CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete) processes, gRPC is asynchronous and more flexible by providing four different options of streaming data. In general, it is possible to make unary gRPC calls, server side streaming, client side streaming and bidirectional streaming.

Compling

The compilation of Protocol Buffers can be conducted statically by pre-processing or dynamically by loading and parsing the .proto file at runtime.

protoc -I=. ./proto/weather.proto \
  --js_out=import_style=commonjs,binary:./server \
  --grpc_out=./server \
  --plugin=protoc-gen-grpc=`which grpc_tools_node_protoc_plugin`

While the statical compilation is executed as above, the dynamic conversion requires some additional setup and a package that can be installed with npm install @grpc/proto-loader.

HowTo

• Install Dependencies with npm install.
• Compile Proto file by npm run proto.
• Generate SSL Certificates for encrypted communication by npm run gen:certs.
• Start server by npm run server.
• Start client by npm run client.

Helpful Resources & Acknowledgements

• Official gRPC Node Documentation
• Gonzalo Bahamodez and his gRPC SSL Demo
• Official gRPC Java Documentation
• Official Protobuf Documentation

grpc-service's Issues

Better gRPC ErrorHandling

Setup Client, Server and BiDirectional Streaming

setup API for other streaming services

• construct correct api connection

Enable Dynamic Compilation

Setup compilation of .proto files to allow for dynamic conversion into .js code at run time

Integrate OpenWeatherMap

• Integrate actual API to obtain recent weather data
• Don't forget to hide creds
• Inspiration

Work on Readme for Dynamic Compilation

fix api bug

• fix bug and set uip api correctly

SSL Security Integration

• enable enhanced security by allowing end to end encription
• set up SSL certs

Setup Docker Image

HowTo Reference