Creating your first protocol buffer

Protocol buffers are a flexible, efficient, and automated mechanism for encoding and serializing structured data supported by Go. In this recipe, we will learn how to write our first protocol buffer.

Getting ready…

1. Verify whether protoc is installed by executing the following command:

$ protoc --version
 libprotoc 3.3.2

2. Install protobuf by way of the following:

$ git clone https://github.com/google/protobuf
$ cd protobuf
$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make check
$ make install

How to do it…

1. Create hello.proto inside the proto directory and define a service interface with the name Say, which has two datatypes—Request and Response, as follows:

syntax = "proto3";
service Say 
{
  rpc Hello(Request) returns (Response) {}
}
message Request 
{
  string name = 1;
}
message Response 
{
  string msg = 1;
}

2. Compile hello.proto with the following command:

$ protoc --go_out=plugins=micro:. hello.proto

How it works…

Once the command has executed successfully, hello.pb.go...