Install the Protocol Buffer Compiler

Distributed Services with Go — by Travis Jeffery (18 / 84)

👈 Why Use Protocol Buffers? | TOC | Define Your Domain Types as Protocol Buffers 👉

The first thing we need to do to get you compiling protobuf is — you guessed it — install the compiler. Go to the Protobuf release page on GitHub[4] and download the relevant release for your computer. If you’re on a Mac, for instance, you’d download protoc-3.9.0-osx-x86_64.zip. You can download and install in your terminal like so:

​ $ wget https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/​\​
​ releases/download/v3.9.0/protoc-3.9.0-osx-x86_64.zip
​ $ unzip protoc-3.9.0-osx-x86_64.zip -d /usr/local/protobuf

Here’s what the layout and files in the extracted protobuf directory look like:

​ ❯ tree /usr/local/protobuf
​ /usr/local/protobuf
​ ├── bin
​ │   └── protoc
​ ├── include
​ │   └── google
​ │       └── protobuf
​ │           ├── any.proto
​ │           ├── api.proto
​ │           ├── compiler
​ │           │   └── plugin.proto
​ │           ├── descriptor.proto
​ │           ├── duration.proto
​ │           ├── empty.proto
​ │           ├── field_mask.proto
​ │           ├── source_context.proto
​ │           ├── struct.proto
​ │           ├── timestamp.proto
​ │           ├── type.proto
​ │           └── wrappers.proto
​ └── readme.txt

As you can see, a protobuf installation consists of two directories. The bin directory contains the compiler…