Using Protobuf with Go: Installation, Code Examples, and Serialization

Protobuf is a Google‑developed data description language that serializes structured data, offering smaller message size, faster parsing speed, and high integration compared to JSON and XML.

The article explains how to install the protobuf compiler (protoc) on Linux, resolve common library issues, and obtain the Go plugin protoc‑gen‑go (placed in $GOPATH/bin and added to PATH ).

Installation commands are shown, for example: wget https://github.com/google/protobuf/releases/download/v3.6.1/protobuf-all-3.6.1.tar.gz , tar zxvf protobuf-all-3.6.1.tar.gz , cd protobuf-3.6.1 , ./configure , make , make install . A common error libprotoc.so.17: cannot open shared object file is addressed by setting export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib .

After installing the plugin, the guide shows how to create an example/person.proto file with message definitions, compile it using: protoc --go_out=. person.proto , which generates person.pb.go .

A complete Go program is provided that imports the generated package, creates Person and AllPerson instances, marshals them with proto.Marshal , unmarshals with proto.Unmarshal , and prints each person's name:

package main

import (
    "example"
    "log"
    "github.com/golang/protobuf/proto"
    "fmt"
)

func main() {
    p1 := example.Person{Id: proto.Int32(1), Name: proto.String("lvxin")}
    p2 := example.Person{Id: 2, Name: "gopher"}
    allP := example.AllPerson{Per: []*example.Person{&p1, &p2}}
    data, err := proto.Marshal(&allP)
    if err != nil { log.Fatalln("Marshal data error:", err) }
    var target example.AllPerson
    err = proto.Unmarshal(data, ⌖)
    if err != nil { log.Fatalln("Unmarshal data error:", err) }
    for k, v := range target.Per {
        fmt.Println("person[", k, "]:", v.Name)
    }
}

Running the program produces output such as:

person[0]: lvxin
person[1]: gopher
Process finished with exit code 0

All source code is hosted on GitHub (https://github.com/lvxin1986/protobuf-golang), and the article lists additional reference links for further reading.