protons

Protobuf to ts transpiler

Table of contents

• Install
• Usage
• Differences from protobuf.js
• Contribute
• License
• Contribute

Install

$ npm i protons

protons contains the code to compile .proto files to .ts files and protons-runtime contains the code to do serialization/deserialization to Uint8Arrays during application execution.

$ npm install --save-dev protons
$ npm install --save protons-runtime

Usage

First generate your .ts files:

$ protons ./path/to/foo.proto ./path/to/output.ts

Then run tsc over them as normal:

$ tsc

In your code import the generated classes and use them to transform to/from bytes:

import { Foo } from './foo.js'

const foo = {
  message: 'hello world'
}

const encoded = Foo.encode(foo)
const decoded = Foo.decode(encoded)

console.info(decoded.message)
// 'hello world'

Differences from protobuf.js

This module uses the internal reader/writer from protobuf.js as it is highly optimised and there's no point reinventing the wheel.

It does have one or two differences:

1. Supports proto3 semantics only
2. All 64 bit values are represented as BigInts and not Longs (e.g. int64, uint64, sint64 etc)
3. Unset optional fields are set on the deserialized object forms as undefined instead of the default values
4. singular fields set to default values are not serialized and are set to default values when deserialized if not set - protobuf.js diverges from the language guide around this feature

Missing features

Some features are missing OneOf, Maps, etc due to them not being needed so far in ipfs/libp2p. If these features are important to you, please open PRs implementing them along with tests comparing the generated bytes to protobuf.js and pbjs.

Contribute

Feel free to join in. All welcome. Open an issue!

This repository falls under the IPFS Code of Conduct.

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE / http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT (LICENSE-MIT / http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

Contribute

Feel free to join in. All welcome. Open an issue!

This repository falls under the IPFS Code of Conduct.