If you are in a hurry

For language-specific installation instructions for gRPC runtime, please refer to these documents

  • C++: Currently to install gRPC for C++, you need to build from source as described below.
  • C#: NuGet package Grpc
  • Go: go get google.golang.org/grpc
  • Java
  • Node: npm install grpc
  • Objective-C
  • PHP: pecl install grpc
  • Python: pip install grpcio
  • Ruby: gem install grpc

Pre-requisites

Linux

 $ [sudo] apt-get install build-essential autoconf libtool

If you plan to build from source and run tests, install the following as well:

 $ [sudo] apt-get install libgflags-dev libgtest-dev
 $ [sudo] apt-get install clang libc++-dev

Mac OSX

For a Mac system, git is not available by default. You will first need to install Xcode from the Mac AppStore and then run the following command from a terminal:

 $ [sudo] xcode-select --install

Protoc

By default gRPC uses protocol buffers, you will need the protoc compiler to generate stub server and client code.

If you compile gRPC from source, as described below, the Makefile will automatically try and compile the protoc in third_party if you cloned the repository recursively and it detects that you don't already have it installed.

Build from Source

For developers who are interested to contribute, here is how to compile the gRPC C Core library.

 $ git clone -b $(curl -L http://grpc.io/release) https://github.com/grpc/grpc
 $ cd grpc
 $ git submodule update --init
 $ make
 $ [sudo] make install

Windows

There are several ways to build under Windows, of varying complexity depending on experience with the tools involved.

Pre-generated Visual Studio solution

The pre-generated VS projects & solution are checked into the repository under the vsprojects directory.

Building using CMake (with BoringSSL)

  • Install CMake.
  • Install Active State Perl (choco install activeperl)
  • Install Ninja (choco install ninja)
  • Install Go (choco install golang)
  • Install yasm and add it to PATH (choco install yasm)
  • Run these commands in the repo root directory
> md .build
> cd .build
> call "%VS140COMNTOOLS%..\..\VC\vcvarsall.bat" x64
> cmake .. -GNinja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
> cmake --build .

NOTE: Currently you can only use Ninja to build using cmake on Windows (because of the boringssl dependency).

msys2 (with mingw)

The Makefile (and source code) should support msys2's mingw32 and mingw64 compilers. Building with msys2's native compiler is also possible, but difficult.

This approach requires having msys2 installed.

# Install prerequisites
MSYS2$ pacman -S autoconf automake gcc libtool mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain perl pkg-config zlib
MSYS2$ pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-gflags

# From mingw shell
MINGW64$ export CPPFLAGS="-D_WIN32_WINNT=0x0600"
MINGW64$ make

NOTE: While most of the make targets are buildable under Mingw, some haven't been ported to Windows yet and may fail to build (mostly trying to include POSIX headers not available on Mingw).