protoboeuf

Repository for an experimental version of a pure-Ruby protobuf encoder / decoder supporting proto3. This Ruby gem is aimed at Shopify-internal use cases, and currently comes with limited support. Protoboeuf is a work in progress. This software is not in a mature state, and is likely to contain bugs, lack certain features, and not be fully conformant to the protobuf specification. We currently are not looking for open source contributors.

Getting started

Make sure you have protobuf installed. On macOS it's like this:

brew install protobuf

Then run bundle to install dependencies:

$ bundle

Compiling .proto Files

You can compile your own .proto files to generate importable .rb files:

bin/protoboeuf test.proto >> test.rb

The above will produce a .rb file with Ruby classes representing each message type.

Running tests

Run all tests like this:

bundle exec rake test

Run one test file like this:

bundle exec ruby -I lib:test test/message_test.rb

Run one test within a file like this:

bundle exec ruby -I lib:test test/message_test.rb -n test_decoding

Generated files

Files under lib/proto are generated from the .proto files in test/fixtures. For example, currently lib/proto/test/fixtures/test_pb.rb is generated from the file test/fixtures/test.proto

Running rake test will automatically regenerate the .rb files if the .proto files ever change.

If you would like to forcibly delete the generated .rb files run this:

bundle exec rake clobber

If you would like to regenerate the .rb files without running any tests, do this:

bundle exec rake gen_proto

Benchmarks

Run benchmarks like this:

$ rake bench

Benchmark protobuf files are in bench/fixtures, and the benchmarks themselves live in bench/benchmark.rb.

Development Tips

To view the protobuf encoding for a given message:

bundle exec ruby -I lib -rproto/test/fixtures/test_pb -e'p TestSigned.encode(TestSigned.new.tap { |x| x.a = -123 })'
"\b\xF5\x01"