Server Reflection & Dynamic Clients
Enable gRPC server reflection so tools and clients can discover services and message schemas at runtime without precompiled stubs.
The Stub Discovery Problem
Normally a client needs the .proto files compiled into stubs to call a service. That is inconvenient for debugging tools and generic clients.
Server reflection lets a server describe its own API at runtime.
What Reflection Exposes
The reflection service answers questions like:
- Which services does this server host?
- What methods does a service have?
- What are the request/response message schemas?
It returns the underlying FileDescriptorProto data.
All lessons in this course
- gRPC-Web Integration
- gRPCurl and BloomRPC
- Service Discovery Patterns
- Server Reflection & Dynamic Clients