Copyright 2008 Google LLC

Protocol Buffers (a.k.a., protobuf) are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data. You can learn more about it in protobuf's documentation.

This README file contains protobuf installation instructions. To install protobuf, you need to install the protocol compiler (used to compile .proto files) and the protobuf runtime for your chosen programming language.

Most users will find working from supported releases to be the easiest path.

If you choose to work from the head revision of the main branch your build will occasionally be broken by source-incompatible changes and insufficiently-tested (and therefore broken) behavior.

If you are using C++ or otherwise need to build protobuf from source as a part of your project, you should pin to a release commit on a release branch.

This is because even release branches can experience some instability in between release commits.

Protobuf supports Bzlmod with Bazel 8 +. Users should specify a dependency on protobuf in their MODULE.bazel file as follows.

bazel_dep(name = "protobuf", version = <VERSION>)

Users can optionally override the repo name, such as for compatibility with WORKSPACE.

bazel_dep(name = "protobuf", version = <VERSION>, repo_name = "com_google_protobuf")

Users can also add the following to their legacy WORKSPACE file.

Note that with the release of 30.x there are a few more load statements to properly set up rules_java and rules_python.

http_archive(
    name = "com_google_protobuf",
    strip_prefix = "protobuf-VERSION",
    sha256 = ...,
    url = ...,
)

load("@com_google_protobuf//:protobuf_deps.bzl", "protobuf_deps")

protobuf_deps()

load("@rules_java//java:rules_java_deps.bzl", "rules_java_dependencies")

rules_java_dependencies()

load("@rules_java//java:repositories.bzl", "rules_java_toolchains")

rules_java_toolchains()

load("@rules_python//python:repositories.bzl", "py_repositories")

py_repositories()