Quick start

This guide gets you started with gRPC-Web with a simple working example.

Quick start

This guide gets you started with gRPC-Web with a simple working example.

Prerequisites

Get the example code

The example code is part of the grpc-web repo.

  1. Download the repo as a zip file and unzip it, or clone the repo:

    $ git clone https://github.com/grpc/grpc-web
    
  2. Change to the repo’s root directory:

    $ cd grpc-web
    

Run an Echo example from your browser!

From the grpc-web directory:

  1. Fetch required packages and tools:

    $ docker-compose pull prereqs node-server envoy commonjs-client
    
  2. Launch services as background processes:

    $ docker-compose up -d node-server envoy commonjs-client
    
  3. From your browser:

    You’ll see your message echoed by the server below the input box.

Congratulations! You’ve just run a client-server application with gRPC.

Once you are done, shutdown the services that you launched earlier by running the following command:

$ docker-compose down

What is happening?

This example app has three key components:

  1. node-server is a standard gRPC server, implemented in Node. This server listens at port :9090, and implements the app’s business logic (echoing client messages).
  2. envoy is the Envoy proxy. It listens at :8080 and forwards the browser’s gRPC-Web requests to port :9090.
  3. commonjs-client: this component generates the client stub class using the protoc-gen-grpc-web protoc plugin, compiles all the JS dependencies using webpack, and hosts the static content (echotest.html and dist/main.js) at port :8081 using a simple web server. User messages entered from the webpage are sent to the Envoy proxy as gRPC-web requests.

What’s next