ProtoGen

CLI tool to parse protobuf .proto file to C#, based on protobuf-net, also works on Windows/Mac/Linux.

Purpose

• protobuf, Protocol Buffers - Google's data interchange format https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/

• protobuf-net, a C# implementation, by Marc Gravell, https://github.com/mgravell/protobuf-net

• protogen.exe, a CLI comes with protobuf-net project, can parse .proto to C#, but it works on Windows only.

• node-protogen-csharp, this tool, a wrapper to protogen.exe, can also work on Mac/Linux.

Install

[sudo] npm install -g protogen

Dependency

It comes with protogen.exe, written in C#, and built with Mono.

It works on Windows, and also works on Mac/Linux, if installed following dependencies:

• Mono, the cool framework to develop and run .NET client and server applications on different platforms. (http://www.mono-project.com/download/)

• protoc, the binary executable of protobuf. Please install it from: https://github.com/google/protobuf, Or with macports:

sudo port install protobuf-cpp

Or, with homebrew:

brew install protobuf

How To Use

Same as protogen.exe on Windows.

protogen -i:{infile2} [-i:{infile2}] [-o:{outfile}] [-t:{template}] [-p:{prop}[=value]] [-q] [-d]

Examples:

protogen -i:input.proto -o:output.cs
protogen -i:input.proto -o:output.xml -t:xml
protogen -i:input.proto -o:output.cs -p:datacontract -q
protogen -i:input.proto -o:output.cs -p:observable=true

How It Works

On windows, it just call the protogen.exe.

On Mac/Linux, it use mono to load protogen.exe.

Credits

A small tool created by Raymond Xie, any comments are welcome.