@bufbuild/connect

@bufbuild/connect

Connect is a family of libraries for building type-safe APIs with different languages and platforms. @bufbuild/connect brings them to TypeScript, the web browser, and to Node.js.

With Connect, you define your schema first:

service ElizaService {
  rpc Say(SayRequest) returns (SayResponse) {}
}

And with the magic of code generation, this schema produces servers and clients:

const answer = await eliza.say({sentence: "I feel happy."});
console.log(answer);
// {sentence: 'When you feel happy, what do you do?'}

Unlike REST, the RPCs you use with Connect are typesafe end to end, but they are regular HTTP under the hood. You can see all requests in the network inspector, and you can curl them if you want:

curl \
    --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
    --data '{"sentence": "I feel happy."}' \
    https://demo.connectrpc.com/connectrpc.eliza.v1.ElizaService/Say

With Connect for ECMAScript, you can spin up a service in Node.js and call it from the web, the terminal, or native mobile clients. Under the hood, it uses Protocol Buffers for the schema, and implements RPC (remote procedure calls) with three protocols: The widely available gRPC and gRPC-web, and Connect's own protocol, optimized for the web. This gives you unparalleled interoperability with full-stack type-safety.

Get started on the web

Follow our 10 minute tutorial where we use Vite and React to create a web interface for ELIZA.

React, Svelte, Vue, Next.js and Angular are supported (see examples), and we have an expansion pack for TanStack Query. We support all modern web browsers that implement the widely available fetch API and the Encoding API.

Get started on Node.js

Follow our 10 minute tutorial to spin up a service in Node.js, and call it from the web, and from a gRPC client in your terminal.

You can use vanilla Node.js, or our server plugins for Fastify or Express. We support the builtin http, and http2 modules on Node.js v16 and later.