gRPC Swagger vs sabledocs

gRPC Swagger is a free, open-source debugging tool for discovering and calling gRPC methods through Swagger UI. It uses server reflection to scan a registered endpoint, identified by host and port, and then displays available services, method definitions, and parameters. Users can invoke methods with Swagger UI’s “Try it out” control, supplying request data and headers as JSON; the headers are passed to the gRPC server as metadata. Reflection must be enabled on the gRPC service, but the setup instructions say proto files and related implementations do not need modification. The project runs from a released JAR or from source and defaults to port 8080. Configuration can show registered services and expire inactive registrations after a chosen number of seconds. Documented endpoints cover registration, service listing, method calls, and Swagger documentation. It is self-hosted, available for API and web use, and licensed under MIT.

Sabledocs is a free, open-source command-line generator for static HTML documentation of Protobuf and gRPC contracts. It can create one documentation site for multiple packages and combine material for Protobuf and gRPC. The input is a binary descriptor generated with protoc; comments require the descriptor to include source information. Search is enabled by default and can use a prebuilt Lunr index, while Markdown is supported in the main content page and Protobuf comments. Configuration in sabledocs.toml covers items such as titles, paths, package visibility, member ordering, and comment filtering. Jinja templates can be customized for primary content, and extra templates can be added to the output. Users can configure source links for Protobuf model members in GitHub, Bitbucket, Bitbucket Data Center, and GitLab repositories. The generator writes the site to sabledocs_output, where it can be opened through index.html. Sabledocs requires Python 3.11 or higher and is installed with pip install sabledocs. A Docker image includes both protoc and Sabledocs.