I was start to learning gRPC / protobuf from last week and I wanna find out best architectures for microservices. So one of the things is to have a IDL repository separately. If so, Any service can generate stub files without proto file copy / paste from another service. Is it possible?

CodePudding user response：

IIRC protoc does not enable referencing protos via URL which is unfortunate as it's a reasonable requirement. It's possible that language-specific implementations of the code generation, do enable this.

I recommend you do publish a project's protos (and possibly cache code protoc-generated from them) in a separate (proto) repo. This facilitates reuse, independent versioning and encourages cross-language use.

If protos are bundled in e.g. a repo including a Golang server implementation, it's more difficult to just clone the protos in order to generate e.g. a Python client.