There’s always that chance that your Go app/service will need to bundle some files in order to fulfill some requirement. A common case of that is bundling SQL migrations into an app. SQL migrations are a set of SQL queries that need to run to set up a clean database, or to change database schema over the course of the applications lifetime.

When it comes to generating code, I often find that the simplest code generation only needs variable replacement. There’s a cli utility that already facilitates this with environment variables, named envsubst, part of the gettext suite of tools.

A common pattern which we want to support when building our services is to build everything under rpc/{service}/{service}.proto as well as cmd/* and other locations which may be manually written or generated with various tools.

We implemented a Twitch RPC generator in the previous chapter, but we do have some hard core gRPC fans that requested that I should check out what gRPC produces. I am interested into comparing these two as well, so let’s start by scaffolding our gRPC handlers. Our main goal is to compare the implementation details of gRPC over Twitch RPC in more concrete terms.

The next step (or possibly the first step) about implementing a microservice, is defining it’s API endpoints. What people usually do is write http handlers and resort to a routing framework like go-chi/chi. But, protocol buffers can define your service, as RPC calls definitions are built into the protobuf schema.

In it’s most basic ways, protocol buffers or protobufs are an approach to serialize structured data with minimal overhead. They require that the data structures be known and compatible between the client and server, unlike JSON where the structure itself is part of the encoding.