RPC in Go using Twitch’s Twirp

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Getting Started

Twirp is an RPC framework from Twitch that just like gRPC uses Protobufs and is much simpler. In this article, I am going to give you a taste of Twirp. You can find the complete code for this article in this GitHub repository.

🙋‍♂️ This article presumes that you are familiar with Protobufs and the concept of RPC.

Setup Project

Project creation and installation instructions for protoc tool and twirp/proto.

1. Create a new Go project.

$ mkdir go-twirp-rpc-example
$ cd go-twirp-rpc-example
$ go mod init github.com/gurleensethi/go-twirp-rpc-example

Create three folders server, client and rpc in the project so that the folder structure looks like this.

go-twirp-rpc-example/
├─ client/
├─ server/
├─ rpc/
   ├─ notes/

1. Install the protoc and twirp-protoc generators (these are cli tools).

$ go install github.com/twitchtv/twirp/protoc-gen-twirp@latest
$ go install google.golang.org/protobuf/cmd/protoc-gen-go@latest

1. Install protobuf and twirp modules in project.

$ go get github.com/twitchtv/twirp
$ go get google.golang.org/protobuf

Writing Proto file

Since Twirp uses Protobufs to generate clients, we need to write a .proto file.

You will be building a simple note-taking application that only has two features:

1. Get all notes.
2. Create a new note.

Here is the proto definition model (store it in rpc/notes/service.proto).

syntax = "proto3";

package gotwirprpcexample.rpc.notes;
option go_package = "rpc/notes";
message Note {
    int32 id = 1;
    string text = 2;
    int64 created_at = 3;
}
message CreateNoteParams {
    string text = 1;
}
message GetAllNotesParams {
}
message GetAllNotesResult {
    repeated Note notes = 1;
}
service NotesService {    
    rpc CreateNote(CreateNoteParams) returns (Note);
    rpc GetAllNotes(GetAllNotesParams) returns (GetAllNotesResult);
}

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