pbuildrs

A Protocol Buffers builder for Rust (pb builder rs).

What is this?

This is a small CLI tool that is designed to do two things:

1. Patch any Protobuf files that use editions instead of the proto2 or proto3 syntax.
2. Generate a proper set of Rust modules that reflect the package structure of the source Protobuf definitions.

It uses prost Protobuf implementation via the tonic-prost-build crate.

Why is this necessary?

1. Prost does not currently support editions. Some work is being done there, but until it is completed, we can't compile edition-enabled files with Prost. For the use cases this project is currently used, it is sufficient to simply swap edition = "2023"; with syntax = "proto3";, but it will not work as intended in all cases, for example in projects that take advantage of the edition features.
2. Prost generated code produces "flat" source files, one per package name. It is designed to be run in build.rs and subsequently included into the source code of the project using the include!(...) macro. This works in some situations, but doesn't scale well. One has to bring Protobuf files into each project where it needs to be used, maintain the build.rs file, ensuring that module structure is correct, incurr additional penalty at build times, have protoc installed in their environments, yada, yada. With pbuildrs, one can generate the source code with a proper module structure that can be turned into a library/crate and reused across projects as needed.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

Contribution

For contribution guidelines see CONTRIBUTING.md.