Connect for ECMAScript

Connect is a family of libraries for building type-safe APIs with different languages and platforms.
@bufbuild/connect brings them to TypeScript, the web browser, and to Node.js.

With Connect, you define your schema first:

service ElizaService {
  rpc Say(SayRequest) returns (SayResponse) {}
}

And with the magic of code generation, this schema produces servers and clients:

const answer = await eliza.say({sentence: "I feel happy."});
console.log(answer);
// {sentence: 'When you feel happy, what do you do?'}

Unlike REST, the Remote Procedure Call are type-safe, but they are regular HTTP under the hood. You can see all requests in the network inspector, and you can curl them if you want:

curl \
    --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
    --data '{"sentence": "I feel happy."}' \
    https://demo.connect.build/buf.connect.demo.eliza.v1.ElizaService/Say

Connect uses Protocol Buffers for the schema, and implements RPC with three protocols: The widely available gRPC and gRPC-web protocols, and Connect's own protocol, optimized for the web. This gives you unparalleled interoperability across many platforms and languages, with type-safety end-to-end.

Get started on the web

Follow our 10 minute tutorial where we use Vite and React to create a web interface for ELIZA.

React, Svelte, Vue, Next.js and Angular are supported (see examples), and we have an expansion pack for TanStack Query. We support all modern web browsers that implement the widely available fetch API and the Encoding API.

Get started on Node.js

Follow our 10 minute tutorial to spin up a service in Node.js, and call it from the web, and from a gRPC client in your terminal.

You can use vanilla Node.js, or our server plugins for Fastify or Express. We support the builtin http, and http2 modules on Node.js v16 and later.

Other platforms

Would you like to use Connect on other platforms like Bun, Deno, Vercel’s Edge Runtime, or Cloudflare Workers? We’d love to learn about your use cases and what you’d like to do with Connect. You can reach us either through the Buf Slack or by filing a GitHub issue and we’d be more than happy to chat!

Packages

@bufbuild/connect: RPC clients and servers for your schema (source code).
@bufbuild/protoc-gen-connect-es: Code generator plugin for the services in your schema (source code).
@bufbuild/connect-web: Adapters for web browsers, and any other platform that has the fetch API on board.
@bufbuild/connect-node: Serve RPCs on vanilla Node.js servers. Call RPCs with any protocol.
@bufbuild/connect-fastify: Plug your services into a Fastify server.
@bufbuild/connect-express: Adds your services to an Express server.

The libraries and the generated code are compatible with ES2017 and TypeScript 4.1.

Ecosystem

connect-es-integration: Examples for using Connect with various TypeScript web frameworks and tooling
connect-query: TypeScript-first expansion pack for TanStack Query that gives you Protobuf superpowers
connect-swift: Idiomatic gRPC & Connect RPCs for Swift.
connect-go: Go implementation of gRPC, gRPC-Web, and Connect
connect-demo: demonstration service powering demo.connect.build
connect-crosstest: gRPC-Web and Connect interoperability tests
Buf Studio: web UI for ad-hoc RPCs

Status

This project is a beta: we rely on it in production, but we may make a few changes as we gather feedback from early adopters. Join us on Slack or see the roadmap discussion for details.

Legal

Offered under the Apache 2 license.

kohenkatz/connect-es