Protocol Buffers (a.k.a., protobuf) are Google's language-neutral,
platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data. You
can learn more about it in protobuf's documentation.
This README file contains protobuf installation instructions. To install
protobuf, you need to install the protocol compiler (used to compile .proto
files) and the protobuf runtime for your chosen programming language.
Working With Protobuf Source Code
Most users will find working from
supported releases to be
the easiest path.
If you choose to work from the head revision of the main branch your build will
occasionally be broken by source-incompatible changes and insufficiently-tested
(and therefore broken) behavior.
If you are using C++ or otherwise need to build protobuf from source as a part
of your project, you should pin to a release commit on a release branch.
This is because even release branches can experience some instability in between
release commits.
Bazel with Bzlmod
Protobuf supports
Bzlmod with Bazel 7 +.
Users should specify a dependency on protobuf in their MODULE.bazel file as
follows.
bazel_dep(name = "protobuf", version = <VERSION>)
Users can optionally override the repo name, such as for compatibility with
WORKSPACE.
bazel_dep(name = "protobuf", version = <VERSION>, repo_name = "com_google_protobuf")
Bazel with WORKSPACE
Users can also add the following to their legacy
WORKSPACE file.
Note that with the release of 30.x there are a few more load statements to
properly set up rules_java and rules_python.
The protobuf compiler is written in C++. If you are using C++, please follow
the C++ Installation Instructions to install protoc along
with the C++ runtime.
For non-C++ users, the simplest way to install the protocol compiler is to
download a pre-built binary from our GitHub release page.
In the downloads section of each release, you can find pre-built binaries in
zip packages: protoc-$VERSION-$PLATFORM.zip. It contains the protoc binary
as well as a set of standard .proto files distributed along with protobuf.
If you are looking for an old version that is not available in the release
page, check out the Maven repository.
These pre-built binaries are only provided for released versions. If you want
to use the github main version at HEAD, or you need to modify protobuf code,
or you are using C++, it's recommended to build your own protoc binary from
source.
Protobuf supports several different programming languages. For each programming
language, you can find instructions in the corresponding source directory about
how to install protobuf runtime for that specific language:
