Generating Go code

To stay impartial in terms of the tools you need to generate code, I will present three different tools from the lowest level to the highest. We are going to start by seeing how to manually generate code with protoc. Then, because we do not want to write lengthy command lines all the time, we are going to see how to make this generation easier with Buf. Finally, we are going to see how to use Bazel to integrate the code generation as part of our build.

Important note

In this section, I’m going to show basic ways of compiling your proto files. Most of the time, these commands will get you by, but sometimes you might have to check each tool’s documentation. For protoc, you can run protoc --help and get a list of the options. For Buf, you can go to the online documentation: https://docs.buf.build/installation. For Bazel, you also have online documentation at https://bazel.build/reference/be/protocol-buffer.

Protoc

Using protoc is the manual...