grpc-templ-docker-cmake

A gRPC C++ Template Project using VS Code, Building in a Docker Container Development Environment with modern CMake

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This project can be used as a template to build gRPC applications within a Docker container using VS Code

It is using modern CMake to build 2 sample applications: greeter_server and greeter_client.

There is nothing special about the C++ gRPC application. It is a copy of a very simple example provided by Google.

The interesting aspects of the project are:

• Docker container development environment for gRPC
  • Creates an easy reproducible environment.
  • Makes it easy to share a project with other developers or move the development environment to a new machine
  • Keeps the main operating system clean making it easy to work with multiple projects
  • Makes it easy to test different library versions or operating systems. Just change the Dockerfile and you can run your application in a completely new environment in minutes.
  • See the Dockerfile in the current repository
• VS Code integration with Docker containers
  • It speeds up the development working with the Docker containers
  • The application is compiled and ran inside the container with full step by step debugging capabilities
  • For more information see Working with Containers Guide and Extension on Microsoft website
  • See the devcontainer.json in the current repository
• Using modern CMake to build the project and automatically generate the proto files
  • The CMakeLists.txt files are spread out within each source subfolder of the project making it easy to follow them and work with large projects.
  • The CMakeLists.txt within the proto folder is responsible of generating the proto source and header files. To use CMake to generate a custom command that executes when we run make, we use add_custom_command, but we also need to add custom targets and link them to the source files that are defined in the source files typically located in another folder. This could be quite challenging and I did not see this done in other gRPC examples.

To find more about gRPC and for a complete set of instructions about the gRPC application see he Hello World app in the C++ gRPC Quick Start page on grpc.io website.

I found this CMake article interesting describing CMake: dependencies between targets and files and custom commands

Steps to build and test the project

• install Docker
• install VS Code
• install Remote Development VS Code extension
• git clone https://github.com/tomatac/grpc-templ-docker-cmake.git
• open the project folder in VS Code
• watch the VS Code messages on the lower right hand side of the screen. Because this project include a ".devcontainer" folder VS code recognize it as a container based development environment. A message should pop up asking to “Reopen folder to develop in a container”. Select “Reopen in Container”
• VS Code will reopen and start to build the container based on the Dockerfile from .devcontainer folder.
• Another message should pop up on lower right hand side of the screen giving the opportunity to Show Log as the container is getting built
• go to the VS Code terminal and build the application
  • note the current folder /workspaces/grpc-templ-docker-cmake. This is the default bind mount of the VS Code project folder into the local file system of the container. You can see here the same files as in the project folder.
  • cd build
  • cmake ..
  • make
• open a new terminal in VS Code to test the server application
  • cd build/src/
  • ./greeter_server
• open a new terminal in VS Code to test the client application
  • cd build/src/
  • ./greeter_client

I welcome comments and improvements ideas to this project.