Protobuf

zero supports Protocol Buffers over HTTP. Define your schema in proto/*.proto, generate Zig structs with zig build gen-proto (runs protoc via the protobuf dependency), then bind the request body and write the response.

See examples/zero-proto for a runnable example.

Define a schema

syntax = "proto3";

message Echo {
  string msg = 1;
  int64 timestamp = 2;
}

Generate the Zig structs

zig build gen-proto
# emits proto/echo.pb.zig (importable as @import("proto/echo.pb.zig"))

Bind and encode in a handler

ctx.bindProto(T) decodes an application/x-protobuf request body into T (any message exposing decode); ctx.protobuf(data) serializes data (exposing encode) into the response with Content-Type: application/x-protobuf.

const std = @import("std");
const zero = @import("zero");

const App = zero.App;
const Context = zero.Context;
const utils = zero.utils;

const pb = @import("proto/echo.pb.zig"); // generated from proto/echo.proto

pub fn main(init: std.process.Init) !void {
    var gpa: std.heap.DebugAllocator(.{}) = .init;
    const allocator = gpa.allocator();
    const app = try App.new(allocator, init.io, init.environ_map);

    try app.post("/echo", echo);
    try app.run();
}

pub fn echo(ctx: *Context) !void {
    const req = (try ctx.bindProto(pb.Echo)) orelse {
        ctx.response.setStatus(.bad_request);
        return;
    };

    var out = req;
    out.timestamp = @intCast(std.Io.Timestamp.now(utils.io, .real).nanoseconds);
    try ctx.protobuf(out);
}

Messages may also be described by hand using the protobuf encode/decode primitives plus a _desc_table.

The runtime primitives are re-exported from the framework root, so generated and hand-written messages can reach them via @import("zero").protobuf (the benchmark and other built-in tools rely on this).