#gRPC Basics: Go
This tutorial provides a basic Go programmer‘s introduction to working with gRPC. By walking through this example you’ll learn how to:
It assumes that you have read the Getting started guide and are familiar with [protocol buffers] (https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/overview). Note that the example in this tutorial uses the proto3 version of the protocol buffers language, which is currently in alpha release:you can find out more in the proto3 language guide and see the release notes for the new version in the protocol buffers Github repository.
This isn't a comprehensive guide to using gRPC in Go: more reference documentation is coming soon.
Our example is a simple route mapping application that lets clients get information about features on their route, create a summary of their route, and exchange route information such as traffic updates with the server and other clients.
With gRPC we can define our service once in a .proto file and implement clients and servers in any of gRPC's supported languages, which in turn can be run in environments ranging from servers inside Google to your own tablet - all the complexity of communication between different languages and environments is handled for you by gRPC. We also get all the advantages of working with protocol buffers, including efficient serialization, a simple IDL, and easy interface updating.
The example code for our tutorial is in grpc/grpc-go/examples/route_guide. To download the example, clone the grpc-go repository by running the following command:
$ go get google.golang.org/grpc
Then change your current directory to grpc-go/examples/route_guide:
$ cd $GOPATH/src/google.golang.org/grpc/examples/route_guide
You also should have the relevant tools installed to generate the server and client interface code - if you don't already, follow the setup instructions in the Go quick start guide.
Our first step (as you'll know from the quick start) is to define the gRPC service and the method request and response types using [protocol buffers] (https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/overview). You can see the complete .proto file in examples/route_guide/proto/route_guide.proto.
To define a service, you specify a named service in your .proto file:
service RouteGuide { ... }
Then you define rpc methods inside your service definition, specifying their request and response types. gRPC lets you define four kinds of service method, all of which are used in the RouteGuide service:
// Obtains the feature at a given position. rpc GetFeature(Point) returns (Feature) {}
stream keyword before the response type.// Obtains the Features available within the given Rectangle. Results are // streamed rather than returned at once (e.g. in a response message with a // repeated field), as the rectangle may cover a large area and contain a // huge number of features. rpc ListFeatures(Rectangle) returns (stream Feature) {}
stream keyword before the request type.// Accepts a stream of Points on a route being traversed, returning a // RouteSummary when traversal is completed. rpc RecordRoute(stream Point) returns (RouteSummary) {}
stream keyword before both the request and the response.// Accepts a stream of RouteNotes sent while a route is being traversed, // while receiving other RouteNotes (e.g. from other users). rpc RouteChat(stream RouteNote) returns (stream RouteNote) {}
Our .proto file also contains protocol buffer message type definitions for all the request and response types used in our service methods - for example, here's the Point message type:
// Points are represented as latitude-longitude pairs in the E7 representation // (degrees multiplied by 10**7 and rounded to the nearest integer). // Latitudes should be in the range +/- 90 degrees and longitude should be in // the range +/- 180 degrees (inclusive). message Point { int32 latitude = 1; int32 longitude = 2; }
Next we need to generate the gRPC client and server interfaces from our .proto service definition. We do this using the protocol buffer compiler protoc with a special gRPC Go plugin.
For simplicity, we‘ve provided a bash script that runs protoc for you with the appropriate plugin, input, and output (if you want to run this by yourself, make sure you’ve installed protoc and followed the gRPC-Go installation instructions first):
$ codegen.sh route_guide.proto
which actually runs:
$ protoc --go_out=plugins=grpc:. route_guide.proto
Running this command generates the following file in your current directory:
route_guide.pb.goThis contains:
RouteGuide service.RouteGuide service.First let‘s look at how we create a RouteGuide server. If you’re only interested in creating gRPC clients, you can skip this section and go straight to Creating the client (though you might find it interesting anyway!).
There are two parts to making our RouteGuide service do its job:
You can find our example RouteGuide server in grpc-go/examples/route_guide/server/server.go. Let's take a closer look at how it works.
As you can see, our server has a routeGuideServer struct type that implements the generated RouteGuideServer interface:
type routeGuideServer struct {
...
}
...
func (s *routeGuideServer) GetFeature(ctx context.Context, point *pb.Point) (*pb.Feature, error) {
...
}
...
func (s *routeGuideServer) ListFeatures(rect *pb.Rectangle, stream pb.RouteGuide_ListFeaturesServer) error {
...
}
...
func (s *routeGuideServer) RecordRoute(stream pb.RouteGuide_RecordRouteServer) error {
...
}
...
func (s *routeGuideServer) RouteChat(stream pb.RouteGuide_RouteChatServer) error {
...
}
...
routeGuideServer implements all our service methods. Let's look at the simplest type first, GetFeature, which just gets a Point from the client and returns the corresponding feature information from its database in a Feature.
func (s *routeGuideServer) GetFeature(ctx context.Context, point *pb.Point) (*pb.Feature, error) { for _, feature := range s.savedFeatures { if proto.Equal(feature.Location, point) { return feature, nil } } // No feature was found, return an unnamed feature return &pb.Feature{"", point}, nil }
The method is passed a context object for the RPC and the client‘s Point protocol buffer request. It returns a Feature protocol buffer object with the response information and an error. In the method we populate the Feature with the appropriate information, and then return it along with an nil error to tell gRPC that we’ve finished dealing with the RPC and that the Feature can be returned to the client.
Now let's look at one of our streaming RPCs. ListFeatures is a server-side streaming RPC, so we need to send back multiple Features to our client.
func (s *routeGuideServer) ListFeatures(rect *pb.Rectangle, stream pb.RouteGuide_ListFeaturesServer) error {
for _, feature := range s.savedFeatures {
if inRange(feature.Location, rect) {
if err := stream.Send(feature); err != nil {
return err
}
}
}
return nil
}
As you can see, instead of getting simple request and response objects in our method parameters, this time we get a request object (the Rectangle in which our client wants to find Features) and a special RouteGuide_ListFeaturesServer object to write our responses.
In the method, we populate as many Feature objects as we need to return, writing them to the RouteGuide_ListFeaturesServer using its Send() method. Finally, as in our simple RPC, we return a nil error to tell gRPC that we've finished writing responses. Should any error happen in this call, we return a non-nil error; the gRPC layer will translate it into an appropriate RPC status to be sent on the wire.
Now let‘s look at something a little more complicated: the client-side streaming method RecordRoute, where we get a stream of Points from the client and return a single RouteSummary with information about their trip. As you can see, this time the method doesn’t have a request parameter at all. Instead, it gets a RouteGuide_RecordRouteServer stream, which the server can use to both read and write messages - it can receive client messages using its Recv() method and return its single response using its SendAndClose() method.
func (s *routeGuideServer) RecordRoute(stream pb.RouteGuide_RecordRouteServer) error {
var pointCount, featureCount, distance int32
var lastPoint *pb.Point
startTime := time.Now()
for {
point, err := stream.Recv()
if err == io.EOF {
endTime := time.Now()
return stream.SendAndClose(&pb.RouteSummary{
PointCount: pointCount,
FeatureCount: featureCount,
Distance: distance,
ElapsedTime: int32(endTime.Sub(startTime).Seconds()),
})
}
if err != nil {
return err
}
pointCount++
for _, feature := range s.savedFeatures {
if proto.Equal(feature.Location, point) {
featureCount++
}
}
if lastPoint != nil {
distance += calcDistance(lastPoint, point)
}
lastPoint = point
}
}
In the method body we use the RouteGuide_RecordRouteServers Recv() method to repeatedly read in our client‘s requests to a request object (in this case a Point) until there are no more messages: the server needs to check the the error returned from Recv() after each call. If this is nil, the stream is still good and it can continue reading; if it’s io.EOF the message stream has ended and the server can return its RouteSummary. If it has any other value, we return the error “as is” so that it'll be translated to an RPC status by the gRPC layer.
Finally, let's look at our bidirectional streaming RPC RouteChat().
func (s *routeGuideServer) RouteChat(stream pb.RouteGuide_RouteChatServer) error { for { in, err := stream.Recv() if err == io.EOF { return nil } if err != nil { return err } key := serialize(in.Location) ... // look for notes to be sent to client for _, note := range s.routeNotes[key] { if err := stream.Send(note); err != nil { return err } } } }
This time we get a RouteGuide_RouteChatServer stream that, as in our client-side streaming example, can be used to read and write messages. However, this time we return values via our method's stream while the client is still writing messages to their message stream.
The syntax for reading and writing here is very similar to our client-streaming method, except the server uses the stream‘s Send() method rather than SendAndClose() because it’s writing multiple responses. Although each side will always get the other's messages in the order they were written, both the client and server can read and write in any order — the streams operate completely independently.
Once we've implemented all our methods, we also need to start up a gRPC server so that clients can actually use our service. The following snippet shows how we do this for our RouteGuide service:
flag.Parse() lis, err := net.Listen("tcp", fmt.Sprintf(":%d", *port)) if err != nil { log.Fatalf("failed to listen: %v", err) } grpcServer := grpc.NewServer() pb.RegisterRouteGuideServer(grpcServer, &routeGuideServer{}) ... // determine whether to use TLS grpcServer.Serve(lis)
To build and start a server, we:
lis, err := net.Listen("tcp", fmt.Sprintf(":%d", *port)).grpc.NewServer().Serve() on the server with our port details to do a blocking wait until the process is killed or Stop() is called.In this section, we'll look at creating a Go client for our RouteGuide service. You can see our complete example client code in grpc-go/examples/route_guide/client/client.go.
To call service methods, we first need to create a gRPC channel to communicate with the server. We create this by passing the server address and port number to grpc.Dial() as follows:
conn, err := grpc.Dial(*serverAddr)
if err != nil {
...
}
defer conn.Close()
You can use DialOptions to set the auth credentials (e.g., TLS, GCE credentials, JWT credentials) in grpc.Dial if the service you request requires that - however, we don't need to do this for our RouteGuide service.
Once the gRPC channel is setup, we need a client stub to perform RPCs. We get this using the NewRouteGuideClient method provided in the pb package we generated from our .proto.
client := pb.NewRouteGuideClient(conn)
Now let's look at how we call our service methods. Note that in gRPC-Go, RPCs operate in a blocking/synchronous mode, which means that the RPC call waits for the server to respond, and will either return a response or an error.
Calling the simple RPC GetFeature is nearly as straightforward as calling a local method.
feature, err := client.GetFeature(context.Background(), &pb.Point{409146138, -746188906})
if err != nil {
...
}
As you can see, we call the method on the stub we got earlier. In our method parameters we create and populate a request protocol buffer object (in our case Point). We also pass a context.Context object which lets us change our RPC‘s behaviour if necessary, such as time-out/cancel an RPC in flight. If the call doesn’t return an error, then we can read the response information from the server from the first return value.
log.Println(feature)
Here‘s where we call the server-side streaming method ListFeatures, which returns a stream of geographical Features. If you’ve already read Creating the server some of this may look very familiar - streaming RPCs are implemented in a similar way on both sides.
rect := &pb.Rectangle{ ... } // initialize a pb.Rectangle stream, err := client.ListFeatures(context.Background(), rect) if err != nil { ... } for { feature, err := stream.Recv() if err == io.EOF { break } if err != nil { log.Fatalf("%v.ListFeatures(_) = _, %v", client, err) } log.Println(feature) }
As in the simple RPC, we pass the method a context and a request. However, instead of getting a response object back, we get back an instance of RouteGuide_ListFeaturesClient. The client can use the RouteGuide_ListFeaturesClient stream to read the server's responses.
We use the RouteGuide_ListFeaturesClient‘s Recv() method to repeatedly read in the server’s responses to a response protocol buffer object (in this case a Feature) until there are no more messages: the client needs to check the error err returned from Recv() after each call. If nil, the stream is still good and it can continue reading; if it's io.EOF then the message stream has ended; otherwise there must be an RPC error, which is passed over through err.
The client-side streaming method RecordRoute is similar to the server-side method, except that we only pass the method a context and get a RouteGuide_RecordRouteClient stream back, which we can use to both write and read messages.
// Create a random number of random points r := rand.New(rand.NewSource(time.Now().UnixNano())) pointCount := int(r.Int31n(100)) + 2 // Traverse at least two points var points []*pb.Point for i := 0; i < pointCount; i++ { points = append(points, randomPoint(r)) } log.Printf("Traversing %d points.", len(points)) stream, err := client.RecordRoute(context.Background()) if err != nil { log.Fatalf("%v.RecordRoute(_) = _, %v", client, err) } for _, point := range points { if err := stream.Send(point); err != nil { log.Fatalf("%v.Send(%v) = %v", stream, point, err) } } reply, err := stream.CloseAndRecv() if err != nil { log.Fatalf("%v.CloseAndRecv() got error %v, want %v", stream, err, nil) } log.Printf("Route summary: %v", reply)
The RouteGuide_RecordRouteClient has a Send() method that we can use to send requests to the server. Once we‘ve finished writing our client’s requests to the stream using Send(), we need to call CloseAndRecv() on the stream to let gRPC know that we've finished writing and are expecting to receive a response. We get our RPC status from the err returned from CloseAndRecv(). If the status is nil, then the first return value from CloseAndRecv() will be a valid server response.
Finally, let‘s look at our bidirectional streaming RPC RouteChat(). As in the case of RecordRoute, we only pass the method a context object and get back a stream that we can use to both write and read messages. However, this time we return values via our method’s stream while the server is still writing messages to their message stream.
stream, err := client.RouteChat(context.Background()) waitc := make(chan struct{}) go func() { for { in, err := stream.Recv() if err == io.EOF { // read done. close(waitc) return } if err != nil { log.Fatalf("Failed to receive a note : %v", err) } log.Printf("Got message %s at point(%d, %d)", in.Message, in.Location.Latitude, in.Location.Longitude) } }() for _, note := range notes { if err := stream.Send(note); err != nil { log.Fatalf("Failed to send a note: %v", err) } } stream.CloseSend() <-waitc
The syntax for reading and writing here is very similar to our client-side streaming method, except we use the stream‘s CloseSend() method once we’ve finished our call. Although each side will always get the other's messages in the order they were written, both the client and server can read and write in any order — the streams operate completely independently.
To compile and run the server, assuming you are in the folder $GOPATH/src/google.golang.org/grpc/examples/route_guide, simply:
$ go run server/server.go
Likewise, to run the client:
$ go run client/client.go