APapayan·Jan 23, 2025
grpcurl is what I use to inspect gRPC apis.
https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcurl
In Understanding gRPC, OpenAPI and REST and when to use them in API design (2020)fullstorydev
grpcurl
Go2018–2025
fullstorydev / grpcurl
grpcurl
Like cURL, but for gRPC: Command-line tool for interacting with gRPC servers
18Distinct people
19Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
12.9KGitHub stars
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What it is
Like cURL, but for gRPC: Command-line tool for interacting with gRPC servers
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- bloomrpc/bloomrpc · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
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HN mentions by year19 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2018-08-29 20:31:10 UTC to 2025-01-23 03:09:34 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
19 sourcesRe. bad tooling. grpcurl[1] is irreplaceable when working with gRPC APIs. It allows you to make requests even if you don't have the .proto around.
[1]: https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcurl
In gRPC: The Bad PartsGrpcurl: Like Curl, but for gRPC
2 points · Open discussion> What is the ubiquitous utility for interacting with gRPC? We have curl for REST. What is openAPI of gRPC?
grpcurl[1] combined with gRPC server reflection[2]. The schema is compiled into the server as an encoded proto which is exposed via server reflection, which grpcurl reads to send correctly encoded requests.
[1] https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcurl
[2] https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/doc/server-reflecti...
In A detailed comparison of REST and gRPCI’ve used a similar tool a bit that did what I needed.
gRPCurl, Like cURL, but for gRPC: Command-line tool for interacting with gRPC servers
https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcurl
The readme in your link mentions how they are different:
> How is protocurl different from grpccurl? grpccurl only works with gRPC services with corresponding endpoints. However, classic REST HTTP endpoints with binary Protobuf payloads are only possible with protocurl.
For my purposes, gRPCurl was a good fit. Maybe to others as well.
In Show HN: ProtoCURL, a curl for ProtobufFor those griping about using JSON manually with their APIs ... This tool is a big help for working with GRPC (at least from cli)
https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcurl
In Connect-Web: TypeScript library for calling RPC servers from web browsersThere is also a very nice Grpc curl that is like curl but protobuf and reflection aware. I think this is it. https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcurl
In The Buf CLI, an all-in-one tool for Protobuf development, has reached v1.0I've been using gRPCurl for years and, once you understand gRPC and Protobuf, it's pretty easy to use and can be scripted in many ways - https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcurl.
In Postman Now Supports gRPCIf you mean actual testing, we use a lot of mocks and this[1] little dude.
[1] https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcurl
In gRPC for Microservices CommunicationGrpCurl helps a bit with this.
https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcurl
In gRPC for Microservices Communication> unless you have Google's size microservices and infrastructure gRPC (with protocol buffers) is just tedious
Having used gRPC in very small teams (<5 engineers touching backend stuff) I had a very different experience from yours.
> need an extra step when doing protoc compilation of your models
For us this was hidden by our build systems. In one company we used Gradle and then later Bazel. In both you can set it up so you plop a .proto into a folder and everything "works" with autocompletes and all.
> cannot easily inspect and debug your messages across your infrastructure without a proper protobuf decoder/encoder
There's a lot of tooling that has recently been developed that makes all of this much easier.
- https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcurl
- https://github.com/uw-labs/bloomrpc
- https://kreya.app/
You can also use grpc-web as a r
Read the rest
everse proxy to expose normal REST-like endpoints for debugging as well.
> If you talk with other non-Go services then a JSON or XML transport encoding will do the job too (JSON rpc).
The benefit of protos is they're a source of truth across multiple languages/projects with well known ways to maintain backwards comparability.
You can even build tooling to automate very complex things:
- Breaking Change Detector: https://docs.buf.build/breaking-usage/
- Linting (Style Checking): https://docs.buf.build/lint-usage/
There's many more things that can be done but you get the idea.
On top of this you get something else that is way better: Relatively fast server that's configured & interfaces with the same way in every programming language. This has been a massive time sink in the past where you have to investigate nginx/*cgi, sonic/flask/waitress/wsgi, rails, and hundreds of other things for every single language stack each with their own gotchas. gRPC's ecosystem doesn't really have that pain point.
There is tooling built to easily do grpc requests from the command line[0] or even a GUI if that's your thing[1].
The tooling isn't quite as ubiquitous as cURL, but if anything I would think that its even easier because you have introspection into the contract with a .proto file.
[0] https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcurl
[1] https://github.com/uw-labs/bloomrpc
In API design is stuck in the pastIn general, not nearly as mature. In general though, gRPC is not for browser->server calls (grpc-web notwithstanding) but is designed for server<->server communication.
There is some tooling out there for development (https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcurl and https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcui are pretty nice) but it's still much less mature than the massive amount of mature tooling available for HTTP-based services. And that is both an artifact of gRPCs relative youth compared to REST and also for some more fundamental reasons (binary wire format, mutual TLS based authentication, etc).
All that said, I've been working with gRPC over the past 6 months or so and overall the development experience is much nicer on net I think.
In Application Load Balancers enables gRPC workloads with end to end HTTP/2 supportGrpcurl: Like cURL,but for gRPC: coin tool for interacting with gRPC servers
1 points · Open discussion> But you can't curl the state of your infra component without creating a program and downloading the client artifacts.
You can if you enable server reflection[1] and use a tool like grpcurl[2].
[1]: https://github.com/grpc/grpc-java/blob/master/documentation/...
[2]: https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcurl
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