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Introduction

grpc-starter is a comprehensive suite of Spring Boot starters designed for the gRPC ecosystem. It offers seamless autoconfiguration and highly extensible capabilities to enhance the integration between Spring Boot and gRPC.

Why Choose grpc-starter?​

While there are existing gRPC Spring Boot starters such as:

grpc-starter was created to address several limitations and provide additional features:

  1. Elegant Client Autoconfiguration: Unlike other starters that require additional annotations like @GrpcClient, grpc-starter allows direct injection of gRPC clients using @Autowired, fully adhering to the Spring bean lifecycle.
  2. Comprehensive Ecosystem Integration: It includes features like gRPC HTTP transcoding, Protobuf validation, and test support, which are often missing in other starters.
  3. Ease of Extension: It provides suitable extension points, making it easier to write and integrate custom extensions.

Core Features​

Client​

  • Autoconfiguration: Automatically configure gRPC clients, allowing direct injection with @Autowired while fully respecting the Spring Bean lifecycle.
  • Dynamic Refreshing: Modify gRPC client configurations at runtime without restarting the application.

Server​

  • Autoconfiguration: Write your gRPC service implementation and expose it as a Spring bean. The framework handles the rest.
  • Exception Handling: Provides @ExceptionHandler-like exception handling for gRPC servers through @GrpcAdvice and @GrpcExceptionHandler.
  • Health Check: Built-in health check support for gRPC servers.

Extensions​

  • gRPC HTTP Transcoding: Enable a single codebase to support both gRPC and HTTP/JSON, similar to grpc-gateway but for Java.
  • Protobuf Validation: Integrate with protovalidate and protoc-gen-validate for Protobuf message validation.
  • Metrics: Support for metrics through Spring Boot Actuator.
  • Tracing: Support for tracing through Spring Boot Actuator.
  • Testing: Integration with SpringBootTest for comprehensive testing support.

This framework is designed with extensibility in mind, allowing you to easily extend it to meet your specific needs.

Project Structure​

├── examples                                # Examples
├── grpc-boot-autoconfigure
│   ├── grpc-client-boot-autoconfigure      # gRPC client autoconfiguration
│   └── grpc-server-boot-autoconfigure      # gRPC server autoconfiguration
├── grpc-extensions
│   ├── grpc-metrics                        # Metrics extension
│   ├── grpc-test                           # Test extension
│   ├── grpc-tracing                        # Tracing extension
│   ├── grpc-transcoding                    # HTTP transcoding extension
│   └── grpc-validation                     # Protobuf validation extension
├── grpc-starter-dependencies               # BOM
├── grpc-starters
│   ├── grpc-boot-starter                   # Core starter, including grpc-client-boot-starter and grpc-server-boot-starter
│   ├── grpc-client-boot-starter            # gRPC client starter
│   ├── grpc-server-boot-starter            # gRPC server starter
│   ├── grpc-starter-metrics                # Metrics starter
│   ├── grpc-starter-protovalidate          # Protobuf validation starter, implemented by protovalidate
│   ├── grpc-starter-test                   # Test starter
│   ├── grpc-starter-tracing                # Tracing starter
│   ├── grpc-starter-transcoding            # HTTP transcoding starter for WebMVC/WebFlux
│   └── grpc-starter-validation             # Protobuf validation starter, implemented by protoc-gen-validate
└── website                                 # Documentation, powered by Docusaurus
tip

Always uses the starters instead of the autoconfigure modules directly.