Protocol Buffers - Google’s data interchange format

Copyright 2023 Google LLC

Overview

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.

Protobuf Compiler Installation

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.

If you would like to build protoc binary from source, see the C++ Installation Instructions.

Protobuf Runtime Installation

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:

Language	Source
C++ (include C++ runtime and protoc)	src
Java	java
Python	python
Objective-C	objectivec
C#	csharp
Ruby	ruby
Go	protocolbuffers/protobuf-go
PHP	php
Dart	dart-lang/protobuf
JavaScript	protocolbuffers/protobuf-javascript

Quick Start

The best way to learn how to use protobuf is to follow the tutorials in our
developer guide.

If you want to learn from code examples, take a look at the examples in the
examples directory.

Documentation

The complete documentation is available at the Protocol Buffers doc site.

Support Policy

Read about our version support policy
to stay current on support timeframes for the language libraries.

Developer Community

To be alerted to upcoming changes in Protocol Buffers and connect with protobuf developers and users,
join the Google Group.