Interact With Protobuf Endpoints in Human-Readable Text Formats Using protoCURL

protoCURL is the command-line tool for interacting with Protobuf over HTTP REST endpoints using human-readable text formats

Do you have difficulties debugging Protocol-Buffers-based HTTP REST endpoints? Since Protobuf uses binary payloads, we face the problem, that we cannot easily write or read our Protobuf payloads with curl directly on the terminal. Ideally, we would like to to use curl with Protobuf just like we use curl with JSON or XML with classic text-based HTTP REST endpoints. ¹

To this problem, we present protoCURL – cURL for Protobuf: The command line tool to quickly and easily write requests in human-readable text formats on the command line against Protocol Buffer over HTTP endpoints and view the output in a text-based format as well.

This can become handy when debugging Protobuf-based HTTP endpoints when they are used instead of JSON.²

The tool was created by myself (GollyTicker) with initial sponsorship from QAware, because of the need for debugging Protobuf REST APIs in our projects.