gRPC File Upload/Download Service in Go

A high-performance file upload/download server built with gRPC in Go, including:

• Stream-based Upload & Download RPCs
• REST API via gRPC-Gateway
• Cobra-based CLI client with progress indicators
• Benchmarking to compare gRPC vs REST

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🛠️ Requirements

• Go 1.20+
• protoc (Protocol Buffers compiler)
• protoc-gen-go, protoc-gen-go-grpc, protoc-gen-grpc-gateway
• make
• curl (for REST benchmarking)

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📦 Install Dependencies

go install google.golang.org/protobuf/cmd/protoc-gen-go@latest
go install google.golang.org/grpc/cmd/protoc-gen-go-grpc@latest
go install github.com/grpc-ecosystem/grpc-gateway/v2/protoc-gen-grpc-gateway@latest

Make sure GOPATH/bin is in your $PATH:

export PATH="$PATH:$(go env GOPATH)/bin"

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📂 Project Structure

.
├── proto/                # .proto definitions
├── pb/                   # generated code
├── cmd/                  # CLI client using Cobra
├── server/             # server implementation
├── uploads/              # uploaded/downloaded files
├── third_party/google/api/annotations.proto
├── Makefile
├── main.go
└── README.md

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🧰 Make Targets

✅ Compile Protobuf

make proto

✅ Run gRPC Server (with gRPC-Gateway for REST)

make run-server

✅ Run Client Rest

make run-client-server

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🚀 Usage

Upload a file via CLI

make run-server
go run client/main.go upload myfile.pdf

Download the same file

make run-server
go run client/main.go download myfile.pdf downloads/download_

You will see progress bars for both upload and download.

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🧪 Benchmark gRPC vs REST

Step 1: Generate a big test file (e.g., 100MB)

dd if=/dev/urandom of=bigfile.bin bs=1M count=100

Step 2: Benchmark gRPC Upload (via CLI)

time go run client/main.go upload bigfile.bin

Step 3: Benchmark REST Upload (via curl)

using base64 if chunks are JSON bytes:

base64 -i bigfile.bin -o base64.txt
echo '{"filename": "bigfile.bin", "file": "'"$(< base64.txt)"'"}' > upload.json
curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/v1/upload \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --data-binary @upload.json

Step 4: Compare execution time and CPU/memory usage

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🔧 Notes

• gRPC is significantly faster and more efficient for large binary data due to protocol buffers.
• REST JSON encoding (especially base64 for bytes) adds overhead.
• This project demonstrates how to bridge both worlds (gRPC + REST) using gRPC-Gateway.

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🧼 Clean Up

make clean

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📜 License

MIT