README.md

Overview

This package allows for automatic recompilation of protocol buffers on import.

Setup

Create a directory with all your protocol buffer definitions in it, like proto/.

Create proto/__init__.py with the following contents:

from import_proto import import_proto

import_proto(__file__)

Now, if you have defined a message Qux in proto/foo/bar/baz.proto like

// proto/foo/bar/baz.proto

message Qux {
    int corge = 1;
}

you can import it like so:

from proto.foo.bar.baz_pb2 import Qux

q = Qux(corge=123)

print(q)
# => corge: 123

The protocol buffer compiler will run on each import.

Known issues:

Protobuf compatibilty

https://gitlab.com/dfritzsche/create-protoc-wheel/-/issues/5

This package depends on protoc-wheel-0 for the protocol buffer compiler. The code generated by the protocol buffer compiler depends on the protobuf package. However, different versions of the protocol buffer compiler, and thus protoc-wheel-0, depend on different versions of the protobuf package, but protoc-wheel-0 does not indicate which version of protobuf it depends on in its requirements.

So if you have, say, protobuf 3.10 installed, you may need to install a version of protoc-wheel-0 that works with that. Generally, you can determine the correct version by cross referencing the release history of protobuf with that of protoc-wheel-0.

Other

The protocol buffer compiler should not re-run if the protocol buffer definition files have not changed.

Development

See DEVELOPMENT.md