Unable to build protoc-gen-grpc-web on macOS

I have been following the grpc-web helloworld example but am stuck when trying to build the protoc-gen-grpc-web plugin on my Mac. Here’s what happens:

nmurthy:grpc-web% sudo make install-plugin
cd "/Users/nmurthy/Workspace/grpc-web"/javascript/net/grpc/web && make install
g++ grpc_generator.o -L/usr/local/lib -lprotoc -lprotobuf -lpthread -ldl -o protoc-gen-grpc-web
ld: library not found for -lprotoc
clang: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)
make[1]: *** [protoc-gen-grpc-web] Error 1
make: *** [install-plugin] Error 2

Wondering how do I properly link this library?

(Cross posted here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/grpc-io/kcIZb6N_Lhg)

Here’s my setup:

nmurthy:grpc-web% protoc --version
libprotoc 3.6.1

nmurthy:grpc-web% which protoc
/Users/nmurthy/Tools/protoc-3.6.1-osx-x86_64/bin/protoc

nmurthy:grpc-web% ls -l ~/Tools/protoc-3.6.1-osx-x86_64/include/google        
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  184 nmurthy  staff  6256 Nov  7 15:12 protobuf

[stanley-cheung]

Oh I see, you have the protoc binary, but not the protoc library that we can link with -lprotoc.

This is not good user experience, but you will have to manually compile and install the protoc library for now.

In the helloworld example README, here’s the instructions on how to compile and install protoc:

$ ./scripts/init_submodules.sh
$ cd third_party/grpc/third_party/protobuf
$ ./autogen.sh && ./configure && make -j8
$ sudo make install

We will be providing pre-compiled binaries for the protoc-gen-grpc-web plugin across a few platforms shortly in the future.

[natemurthy]

Posting here for reference because I liked this solution and maybe others will find this useful as well:

@juanjoDiaz created a Docker image that has all the protoc binaries baked in: https://github.com/grpc/grpc-web/issues/356#issuecomment-436735632