gRPC Go Contracts

Verify the communication of your microservices by writing contracts for your RPCs.

gRPC Go Contracts implements contract programming (aka Design by Contract) for gRPC methods written in go. It supports:

• Preconditions: Preconditions are conditions that must always be true just before the execution of the RPC. In a precondition, you can access RPC's input values.
• Postconditions: Postconditions are conditions that must always be true just after the execution of the RPC. In a postcondition, you can access the RPC's input and return values. Moreover, you will be able to access RPC calls made by the requested RPC during the request lifetime. This allows you to verify the execution order of RPC calls, which is amazing! For more details please see the example below.

In the case of contract violation, gRPC Go Contracts logs the contract error message and related parameters. At this time, just unary RPCs are supported.

For more information please see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_contract

Installation

$ go get github.com/shayanh/grpc-go-contracts/contracts

Usage and Example

Let's consider a very simple note-taking application named MyNote. MyNote consists of two microservices:

• NoteService: NoteService simply stores notes. Its only API is GetNote(note_id, token). GetNote first authenticates the input token by calling AuthServices. If authentication was successful, it returns the related note.
• AuthService: AuthService is responsible for authentication. Its only API is Authenticate(token). Authenticate gets a token, and if the token was valid, it returns the related user ID.

Protocol buffers definition of these services:

package mynote;

service NoteService {
    rpc GetNote(GetNoteRequest) returns (Note) {}
}

message GetNoteRequest {
    int32 note_id = 1;
    string token = 2;
}

message Note {
    int32 note_id = 1;
    string text = 2;
}

service AuthService {
    rpc Authenticate(AuthenticateRequest) returns (AuthenticateResponse) {}
}

message AuthenticateRequest {
    string token = 1;
}

message AuthenticateResponse {
    int32 user_id = 1;
}

Now we want to write the following precondition for GetNote RPC:

1. note_id must be non-negative.

And we want to have the following postconditions for GetNote RPC:

1. If GetNote return value has no error, then GetNote must successfully have called Authenticate RPC on AuthService. We don't want a data breach!
2. If GetNote return value has no error, then output note ID must be equal to input note_id.

First, we define a UnaryRPCContract for GetNote:

getNoteContract := &contracts.UnaryRPCContract{
    MethodName: "GetNote",
    PreConditions: []contracts.Condition{
        func(in *pb.GetNoteRequest) error {
            if in.NoteId < 0 {
                return errors.New("NoteId must be positive")
            }
            return nil
        },
    },
    PostConditions: []contracts.Condition{
        func(out *pb.Note, outErr error, in *pb.GetNoteRequest, calls contracts.RPCCallHistory) error {
            if outErr != nil {
                return nil
            }
            if calls.Filter("mynote.AuthService", "Authenticate").Successful().Empty() {
                return errors.New("no successful call to auth service")
            }
            return nil
        },
        func(out *pb.Note, outErr error, in *pb.GetNoteRequest, calls contracts.RPCCallHistory) error {
            if outErr != nil {
                return nil
            }
            if in.NoteId != out.NoteId {
                return errors.New("wrong note id in response")
            }
            return nil
        },
    },
}

Next, we define a ServiceContract for the NoteService service and a ServerContract for the gRPC server:

noteServiceContract := &contracts.ServiceContract{
    ServiceName: "mynote.NoteService",
    RPCContracts: []*contracts.UnaryRPCContract{
        getNoteContract,
    },
}
serverContract := contracts.NewServerContract(log.Println)
serverContract.RegisterServiceContract(noteServiceContract)

Finally, we use serverContract's interceptors in the gRPC server and clients:

// server
s := grpc.NewServer(grpc.UnaryInterceptor(serverContract.UnaryServerInterceptor()))

// client
conn, err := grpc.Dial(addr, grpc.WithUnaryInterceptor(serverContract.UnaryClientInterceptor()))

A complete version of the MyNote example containing all of the source codes is available here.

API Documentation

See complete API documentation here.

TODO

• Write tests!
• Support streaming RPCs.
• Add terminate option on contract violation.
• Native support of popular logging libraries.
• Add asynchronous contract checking option.