Overview

This is protobuf-c, a C implementation of Google Protocol Buffers. It includes libprotobuf-c, a pure C library that implements protobuf encoding and decoding, and protoc-c, a code generator that converts Protocol Buffer .proto files to C descriptor code, based on the original protoc. It also includes libprotobuf-c-rpc, a separate library for performing RPC with Protocol Buffers.

protobuf-c was originally maintained by Dave Benson through version 0.15 but is now being maintained by a new team. Thanks, Dave!

Building

protobuf-c requires a C compiler, a C++ compiler, Google Protocol Buffers, and pkg-config to be installed.

./configure && make && make install

If building from a git checkout, the autotools (autoconf, automake, libtool) must also be installed, and the build system must be generated by running the autogen.sh script.

./autogen.sh && ./configure && make && make install

The libprotobuf-c-rpc library is included in the source distribution but is not built by default. Add --enable-rpc to the configure command to enable this library.

Synopsis

Include the protobuf-c header file:

#include <protobuf-c/protobuf-c.h>

Link against the protobuf-c library.

-lprotobuf-c

libprotobuf-c includes a pkg-config file. It is recommended to use the pkg-config system in order to determine the complete set of compiler and linker flags for building applications that utilize libprotobuf-c. If using pkg-config with autoconf, the PKG_CHECK_MODULES macro can be used to detect the presence of libprotobuf-c:

PKG_CHECK_MODULES([PROTOBUF_C], [libprotobuf-c])

This will place compiler flags in the PROTOBUF_C_CFLAGS variable and linker flags in the PROTOBUF_C_LDFLAGS variable.

(Note that the protobuf-c header file used to be installed as google/protobuf-c/protobuf-c.h in previous versions.)

Contributing

Please send patches to the protobuf-c mailing list or by opening a GitHub pull request.

Copyright to all contributions are retained by the original author, but must be licensed under the terms of the BSD-2-Clause license. Please add a Signed-off-by header to your commit message (git commit -s) to indicate that you are licensing your contribution under these terms.