GopherJS gRPC-Web Boilerplate
A minimal repo containing all the boilerplate for getting started with
GopherJS using gRPC-Web. Clone and use as a base for your own
experimentation with GopherJS and gRPC-Web!
It comes complete with a Go generate template for statically serving
your generated JS code from the backend server.
Video example
A recording of my presentation at the Go Devroom at FOSDEM 2018, in which
I clone this repo I perform a small demo of its use.
Requirements
Generating the files requires the protoc protobuf compiler.
Please install it according to the
installation instructions
for your specific platform.
Getting started
After cloning the repo, there are a couple of initial steps;
- Install the generate dependencies with
make install.
This will installprotoc-gen-goandprotoc-gen-gopherjs, which
are necessary for us to generate the Go and GopherJS files. - Generate a self-signed certificate with
make generate_cert.
This is necessary for us to serve the GopherJS files over HTTPS.
When opening your browser it will not trust the certificate, so
if you want to, you can add the generate certificate to your trust store first. - If you forked this repo, or cloned it into a different directory from the github structure,
you will need to correct the import paths. Here's a nicefindone-liner for accomplishing this
(replaceyourscmprovider.com/youruser/yourrepowith your cloned repo path):$ find . -path ./vendor -prune -o -type f \( -name '*.go' -o -name '*.proto' \) -exec sed -i -e "s;github.com/johanbrandhorst/grpcweb-boilerplate;yourscmprovider.com/youruser/yourrepo;g" {} + - Finally, generate the JS files with
make generate.
If you encounter an error here, make sure you've installed
protocand it is accessible in your$PATH, and make sure
you've performed step 1.
Now you can run the web server with make serve.
Making it your own
The next step is to define the interface you want to expose in
proto/web.proto. See https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/
tutorials and guides on writing protofiles.
Once that is done, regenerate the backend and frontend files using
make generate. This will mean you'll need to implement any functions in
backend/backend.go, or else the build will fail since your struct won't
be implementing the interface defined by the generated file in proto/server/.
It also means you can start using the functions exposed by the server
in your frontend client in frontend/frontend.go.
Every time you make changes to any files under frontend/ you'll
need to regenerate the JS files using make generate.
This should hopefully be
all you need to get started playing around with the GopherJS gRPC-Web
bindings!
What this repo isn't
This repo is not a general example of how to use the GopherJS gRPC-Web bindings.
For such an example, please see https://github.com/johanbrandhorst/grpcweb-example
and https://grpcweb.jbrandhorst.com.
This repo is also not a particularly good example of how to write an app with
GopherJS. Please explore the tutorials and wiki pages on
https://github.com/gopherjs/gopherjs and check out frameworks such as
https://myitcv.io/react and https://github.com/gopherjs/vecty for
a better way to write GopherJS apps.