@bveenema/node-red-protobuf

This project features protobuf encode/decode nodes. Load a proto file, supply a desired type for encoding or decoding and have fun. It is originally based on the node-red-contrib-protobuf project but has been enhanced with the following features:

• Advanced Decoding and Encoding Options
  • Include default values
  • Specify type for Enums, Longs and Bytes
  • Flexible encode for on-the-fly conversion including ability to specify enums by string
• Stream Input Mode
• Support for Delimited messages
• Improved UI for selecting Proto Files and Types
• Automatically split decoded messages into their respective fields

Installation

To install run

npm install --production --save @bveenema/node-red-protobuf 

Omit the --production flag, in order to install the development dependencies for testing and coverage. Omit --save if you don't want to add it to your package.json.

This node depends on protobufjs as the main package and will install it along with it.

Usage

1. Place an encode/decode node on a flow
2. Configure the protofile path pointing to your protobuf file(s)
3. Either supply a proto type
   1. within the encode/decode configuration
   2. with the msg.protobufType field (takes precedence over node configuration)
4. Either send a protobuf encoded payload to the decode node or a JSON encoded payload to the encode node

Note on the protofile node The proto file node watches the specified file(s) for changes on the filesystem through nodejs fs API. If the file contents of the .proto-file change on disk, the file becomes reloaded. This may happen multiple times at once due to OS and editor specifics. If multiple comma-separated paths are specified, only the first one is monitored right now to save some resources.

Features

• Encode JSON payload to protobuf messages
• Decode protobuf messages to JSON payload
• Load protobuf file(s) from the local file system
• Consider protos from one or multiple protobuf files (including inheritance)

Contribution

To setup your local development environment first clone this repository, then use a container runtime to get your node-red environment up and running.

Using Podman:

podman run -p 1880:1880 -v $(pwd):/data/node_modules/@bveenema/node-red-protobuf -d --name nodered-contrib-protobuf_plus nodered/node-red

Or using Docker:

# For Linux/Mac:
docker run -p 1880:1880 -v "$(pwd)":/data/node_modules/@bveenema/node-red-protobuf -d --name node-red-protobuf nodered/node-red

# For Windows PowerShell:
docker run -p 1880:1880 -v ${PWD}:/data/node_modules/@bveenema/node-red-protobuf -d --name node-red-protobuf nodered/node-red

After you saved your changes to the code update the installation within the container with this command:

For Podman:

podman exec -it node-red-protobuf npm install /data/node_modules/@bveenema/node-red-protobuf/ && podman restart nodered-contrib-protobuf_plus

For Docker:

# For Linux/Mac:
docker exec -it node-red-protobuf npm install /data/node_modules/@bveenema/node-red-protobuf/ && docker restart node-red-protobuf

# For Windows PowerShell:
docker exec -it node-red-protobuf npm install /data/node_modules/@bveenema/node-red-protobuf/; docker restart node-red-protobuf 

Note: On SELinux enabled machines it's necessary to allow containers access to your working directory like this: chcon -t container_file_t $(pwd)

Testing and Coverage-Report

First npm install for the dev dependencies. Tests, linting and code coverage are then available through:

npm test
npm run coverage
npm run lint

License

The BSD 3-Clause License

Contributors

Forked and enhanced from original project node-red-contrib-protobuf by Alexander Wellbrock

Changelog

2.2.1

• Fixed issue with decoding delimited messages that have multi-byte varint length prefixes
• Added tests to verify correct handling of both single-byte and multi-byte varint length prefixes
• Updated minimum Node.js requirement to 12.0.0
• Updated dependencies:
  • eslint to 8.31.0
  • mocha to ^10.0.0
  • nyc to 15.1.0
  • protobufjs to ^7.0.0