Install grpc with Homebrew, apk, apt, dnf, MacPorts, Nix, pacman, zypper

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• grpc_cpp_plugin
• grpc_csharp_plugin
• grpc_node_plugin
• grpc_objective_c_plugin
• grpc_php_plugin
• grpc_python_plugin
• grpc_ruby_plugin

Project history

The gRPC design came from Google's internal Stubby RPC infrastructure. The official 2015 motivation and design post explains that Stubby had connected large numbers of Google microservices for more than a decade but was tied to internal infrastructure, while HTTP/2 and related public standards made an open rework practical.

gRPC was announced publicly in 2015 and reached 1.0 on 2016-08-23. The 1.0 announcement stated that C++, Java, Go, Node, Ruby, Python, and C# moved to 1.0 across Linux, Windows, and Mac, with Objective-C and Android Java support also moving to 1.0.

The 1.0 release established a stable core protocol and API surface, semantic versioning expectations, cross-language interoperability tests, and public performance measurements. That combination made gRPC packageable not only as a library but as a cross-language toolchain component.

CNCF accepted gRPC on 2017-02-16 at the Incubating maturity level. The CNCF project page identifies it as a high-performance open source universal RPC framework and exposes project health and contributor metrics through LFX insights.

Adoption history

The 1.0 announcement described early usage in open source projects such as etcd, containerd, and CockroachDB and by companies including Netflix, Vendasta, YikYak, Carbon3D, Cisco, Juniper, Arista, and Ciena. It also cited Google Cloud APIs and TensorFlow using gRPC for API surfaces or inter-process communication.

The official site presents gRPC as useful across data centers, mobile applications, browsers, and backend services, with pluggable support for load balancing, tracing, health checking, and authentication.

gRPC-Web extended the model toward browser clients. The official gRPC-Web history notes work beginning in 2016, a 1.0/GA moment in 2018 for the Google implementation, and Envoy-proxy-based deployment patterns for translating browser requests to gRPC HTTP/2 services.

How it is used

Developers define services in `.proto` files, then use `protoc` and gRPC plugins to generate typed client and server code. The Homebrew package's executables are language plugins such as `grpc_cpp_plugin`, `grpc_csharp_plugin`, `grpc_node_plugin`, `grpc_objective_c_plugin`, `grpc_php_plugin`, `grpc_python_plugin`, and `grpc_ruby_plugin`.

Common package use is indirect: a developer installs `grpc` so builds can generate service stubs, compile native gRPC dependencies, or satisfy packages that need C-core-based language bindings.

gRPC's design goals explain why it became a package-manager staple: broad platform coverage, open licensing, interoperability over common infrastructure, general-purpose performance, streaming, blocking and non-blocking APIs, cancellation, flow control, pluggability, metadata, and standardized status codes.

Why package nerds care

gRPC is a dependency magnet. It appears in language package managers, OS package managers, Docker images, generated-code workflows, and cloud-native control planes because service definitions need compiler plugins and runtime libraries.

It also illustrates a hard packaging problem: one protocol family spans C/C++, Go, Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, Objective-C, C#, Node, web proxies, and generated artifacts. OS packages often expose only a slice of that surface while language ecosystems ship their own runtime packages.

For CLI and formula users, the codegen plugins are the visible part. A successful install often matters less because a human will run `grpc_cpp_plugin` directly and more because Bazel, CMake, Make, Gradle, or another build tool can find it during protocol generation.

Timeline

• 2014: CNCF project metrics list the first commit date as 2014-05-06.
• 2015: gRPC design principles were published, describing the public rework of Google's Stubby ideas.
• 2016: gRPC 1.0 was announced on 2016-08-23.
• 2017: gRPC was accepted to CNCF at the Incubating maturity level.
• 2018: gRPC-Web reached general availability for the Google implementation.
• 2021: The gRPC C# project announced a shift toward grpc-dotnet for the future of C# usage.

Related projects

• Protocol Buffers provide the default interface definition language and message encoding for gRPC.
• grpc-go, grpc-java, grpc-node, grpc-dotnet, grpc-web, and other language implementations carry gRPC into specific ecosystems.
• Envoy is commonly used as a gRPC and gRPC-Web proxy in cloud-native deployments.
• grpc-gateway maps gRPC services to REST/JSON interfaces for mixed client environments.
• etcd, containerd, CockroachDB, TensorFlow, and several Google Cloud APIs are prominent projects or services cited by official gRPC materials.

Sources

• https://github.com/grpc/grpc
• https://grpc.io/
• https://grpc.io/blog/ga-announcement/
• https://grpc.io/blog/grpc-csharp-future/
• https://grpc.io/blog/principles/
• https://grpc.io/blog/state-of-grpc-web/
• https://grpc.io/docs/what-is-grpc/introduction/
• https://www.cncf.io/projects/grpc/