protons

Protobuf to ts transpiler

Table of contents

• Install
• Usage
• Differences from protobuf.js
• Missing features
• API Docs
• 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
5. map fields can have keys of any type - protobufs.js only supports strings
6. map fields are deserialized as ES6 Maps - protobuf.js uses Objects

Missing features

Some features are missing OneOfs, 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.

API Docs

• https://ipfs.github.io/protons/modules/protons.html

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

Contributions welcome! Please check out the issues.

Also see our contributing document for more information on how we work, and about contributing in general.

Please be aware that all interactions related to this repo are subject to the IPFS Code of Conduct.

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.