[ANN] grpcget - Customizable command line client for gRPC, also a reusable library

[Rangel Reale]

grpcget is a command-line client for gRPC servers with reflection enabled.

https://github.com/RangelReale/grpcget

With this tool you can query the server for services and symbols, and invoke methods with parameters.

The parameters for a method invocation are simple name=value parameters, and the name can have "." to set values in inner messages.

The default implementation output is aimed to be user-friendly, not JSON or marchine parseable. But using output customizers it is easy to create a version that does output other formats.

grpcget is also a customizable library that you can use in your projects.

It supports customizing setters and getters so you can define special handling for types that your application supports.

Example:

# grpcget -plaintext invoke localhost:50051 helloworld.Greeter.SayHello name="Han Solo"

message: Hello Han Solo

This library is heavily based on grpccurl, and the packages it uses.

Thanks,

Rangel Reale

[Jan Tattermusch]

Hi Rangel,

thanks for sharing!

How does your tool compare to the grpc_cli (which is part of gRPC) in terms of features? What are the key differences, pros and cons?

Jan

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Jan

[Rangel Reale]

Hello,

the main motivation for a new tool was to make a cli for the end user, in my opinion the existing tools are somewhat geared to be used by tools, with hard-to-use parameter input and output.

For example with a (convoluted) request like this, the parameters are easy to enter on the command line, and would be very hard to do with the grpc_cli text format, or json:

service SM {

  rpc SendSM(SMData) returns (SMData);

}

message SMData {

    string data = 1;

    string data2 = 2;

    map<string, SMData> data_list = 3;

    repeated SMData data_repeat = 4;

}

# grpcget invoke localhost:50051 SM.SendSM data="Value" 

data_list.item1.data="Value inside the map with key 'item'" 

data_list.item1.data2="Value inside the same map as the previous param" 

data_repeat.0.data="Value inside the repeat with index '0'"

data_repeat.0.data2="Value into the same index '0' as the previous"

data_repeat.1.data2="Value inside the repeat with index '1'"

The other motivation was to allow intput and output customization, like showing google.protobuf.* types as the real underlining type, and custom application types like UUID to be passed as a single value instead as an internal "user_id.value".

Things that are missing for now are supporting servers without reflection, stream support, and even other intput/output formats like JSON.

Another objective of this was to create an embeddable library that I can use to create a cli for my own service, which for example allows me to abbreviate service names when calling, supporting application specific types and authentication, etc.

gprc_cli also have a problem of documentation, I had to search a lot to find out how to set the parameters on the command line.

Regards,

Rangel

On Tuesday, 24 April 2018 04:35:55 UTC-3, Jan Tattermusch wrote:

Hi Rangel,

thanks for sharing!

How does your tool compare to the grpc_cli (which is part of gRPC) in terms of features? What are the key differences, pros and cons?

Jan

On Mon, Apr 23, 2018 at 1:59 PM, Rangel Reale <range...@gmail.com> wrote:

grpcget is a command-line client for gRPC servers with reflection enabled.

https://github.com/RangelReale/grpcget

With this tool you can query the server for services and symbols, and invoke methods with parameters.

The parameters for a method invocation are simple name=value parameters, and the name can have "." to set values in inner messages.

The default implementation output is aimed to be user-friendly, not JSON or marchine parseable. But using output customizers it is easy to create a version that does output other formats.

grpcget is also a customizable library that you can use in your projects.

It supports customizing setters and getters so you can define special handling for types that your application supports.

Example:

# grpcget -plaintext invoke localhost:50051 helloworld.Greeter.SayHello name="Han Solo"

message: Hello Han Solo

This library is heavily based on grpccurl, and the packages it uses.

Thanks,

Rangel Reale

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Jan