The Buffrs Book

First Steps with Buffrs

This section gives you a quick intro to the buffrs command line interface. Let us take a look at its ability to declare protocol buffer dependencies and to publish new packages to the registry.

To initialize a new project with Buffrs, use buffrs init:

$ mkdir web-server && cd web-server
$ buffrs init --api

Note: By omitting the --api flag (or --lib flag respectively) you instruct Buffrs to not declare a local package and setup the project to be a consumer-only (e.g. a server implementation).

$ tree .
.
├── Proto.toml
└── proto
    └── vendor

2 directories, 1 file

This is all we need to get started. Now let’s check out the newly created Proto.toml:

[package]
name = "web-server"
version = "0.1.0"
type = "api"

[dependencies]

This is called a Buffrs Manifest, and it contains all of the metadata that Buffrs needs to know about your package to install dependencies and distribute your protocol buffers as a package.

Let us define a dependency of the webserver on a hypothetical library called user in the datatypes repository.

This is done by invoking buffrs add:

$ buffrs add --registry https://your.registry.com datatypes/user@=0.1.0

The result is a dependency in the Proto.toml:

[dependencies.user]
version = "=0.1.0"
repository = "datatypes"
registry = "https://your.registry.com/"

Going further

For more details on using Buffrs, check out the Buffrs Guide