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Twirp is a framework for service-to-service communication emphasizing simplicity and minimalism. It generates routing and serialization from API definition files and lets you focus on your application's logic instead of thinking about folderol like HTTP methods and paths and JSON.

Define your service in a Protobuf file and then Twirp autogenerates Go code with a server interface and fully functional clients. It's similar to gRPC, but without the custom HTTP server and transport implementations: it runs on the standard library's extremely-well-tested-and-high-performance net/http Server. It can run on HTTP 1.1, not just http/2, and supports JSON clients for easy integrations across languages

Twirp handles routing and serialization for you in a well-tested, standardized, thoughtful way so you don't have to. Serialization and deserialization code is error-prone and tricky, and you shouldn't be wasting your time deciding whether it should be "POST /friends/:id/new" or "POST /:id/friend" or whatever. Just get to the real work of building services!

Along the way, you get an autogenerated client and a simple, smart framework for passing error messages. Nice!

For more on the motivation behind Twirp (and a comparison to REST APIs and gRPC), the announcement blog post is a good read.

Installation

Use go get to install the Go client-and-server generator:

go get github.com/twitchtv/twirp/protoc-gen-twirp

You will also need:

• protoc, the protobuf compiler. You need version 3+.
• github.com/golang/protobuf/protoc-gen-go, the Go protobuf generator plugin. Get this with go get.

Documentation

Thorough documentation is on the website.

Source for this documentation is in the docs subdirectory. The website is generated from that folder using Docusaurus.

Implementations in other languages

This repo only has the official generators, which write out Go and Python code. For other languages, there are third-party generators available:

Language	Clients	Servers	Repository
Java	✓	✓	github.com/fajran/protoc-gen-twirp_java_jaxrs
Java		✓	https://github.com/devork/flit
JavaScript	✓		github.com/thechriswalker/protoc-gen-twirp_js
JavaScript	✓		github.com/Xe/twirp-codegens/cmd/protoc-gen-twirp_jsbrowser
Typescript	✓		github.com/larrymyers/protoc-gen-twirp_typescript
Ruby	✓	✓	github.com/twitchtv/twirp-ruby
Rust	✓	✓	github.com/cretz/prost-twirp
Swagger	✓	✓	github.com/elliots/protoc-gen-twirp_swagger
PHP	✓	✓	github.com/twirphp/twirp
Dart	✓		github.com/apptreesoftware/protoc-gen-twirp_dart

This list isn't an endorsement, it's just a convenience to help you find stuff for your language.

Support and Community

We have a channel on the Gophers slack, #twirp, which is the best place to get quick answers to your questions. You can join the Gopher slack here.

Releases

Twirp follows semantic versioning through git tags, and uses Github Releases for release notes and upgrade guides: Twirp Releases

Contributing

Check out CONTRIBUTING.md for notes on making contributions.

License

This library is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.