Skip to main content
Pre-release

This release is a pre-release and may not be stable for production use.

Nanopb - Protocol Buffers for Embedded Systems

Latest change Weekly build

Nanopb is a small code-size Protocol Buffers implementation in ansi C. It is especially suitable for use in microcontrollers, but fits any memory restricted system.

Using the nanopb library

To use the nanopb library, you need to do two things:

  1. Compile your .proto files for nanopb, using protoc.
  2. Include pb_encode.c, pb_decode.c and pb_common.c in your project.

The easiest way to get started is to study the project in "examples/simple". It contains a Makefile, which should work directly under most Linux systems. However, for any other kind of build system, see the manual steps in README.txt in that folder.

Generating the headers

Protocol Buffers messages are defined in a .proto file, which follows a standard format that is compatible with all Protocol Buffers libraries. To use it with nanopb, you need to generate .pb.c and .pb.h files from it:

python generator/nanopb_generator.py myprotocol.proto  # For source checkout
generator-bin/nanopb_generator myprotocol.proto        # For binary package

(Note: For instructions for nanopb-0.3.9.x and older, see the documentation of that particular version here)

The binary packages for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X should contain all necessary dependencies, including Python, python-protobuf library and protoc. If you are using a git checkout or a plain source distribution, you will need to install Python separately. Once you have Python, you can install the other dependencies with pip install --upgrade protobuf grpcio-tools.

You can further customize the header generation by creating an .options file. See documentation for details.

Running the tests

If you want to perform further development of the nanopb core, or to verify its functionality using your compiler and platform, you'll want to run the test suite. The build rules for the test suite are implemented using Scons, so you need to have that installed (ex: sudo apt install scons or pip install scons). To run the tests:

cd tests
scons

This will show the progress of various test cases. If the output does not end in an error, the test cases were successful.

Note: Mac OS X by default aliases 'clang' as 'gcc', while not actually supporting the same command line options as gcc does. To run tests on Mac OS X, use: scons CC=clang CXX=clang. Same way can be used to run tests with different compilers on any platform.

For embedded platforms, there is currently support for running the tests on STM32 discovery board and simavr AVR simulator. Use scons PLATFORM=STM32 and scons PLATFORM=AVR to run these tests.

Build systems and integration

Nanopb C code itself is designed to be portable and easy to build on any platform. Often the bigger hurdle is running the generator which takes in the .proto files and outputs .pb.c definitions.

There exist build rules for several systems:

And also integration to platform interfaces:

Release files for nanopb 0.4.8.dev1410

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for nanopb 0.4.8.dev1410
File Size Uploaded
nanopb-0.4.8.dev1410.tar.gz 50.8 kB Details

Built distribution (wheel)

Table of built distributions (wheels) for nanopb 0.4.8.dev1410
File Interpreter ABI Platform
nanopb-0.4.8.dev1410-py2.py3-none-any.whl Python 3, Python 2 none any Details

Total release size: 102.6 kB

Release files / nanopb-0.4.8.dev1410.tar.gz

Download URL nanopb-0.4.8.dev1410.tar.gz
Size 50.8 kB
Tags Source
SHA-256 checksum
How to use checksums
57bb9560449f82b8b410423ffa36b9b914e9616018cd4bea245f50fe975ed92b
BLAKE2b-256 checksum
How to use checksums
5b5c0a75cb131afdf3eadb27f35bcc0289d899b618a12e1414d5126b300a9bb2
Upload date
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing?
What is trusted publishing?
No
Uploaded via poetry/1.5.1 CPython/3.8.10 Linux/5.15.0-1040-azure

Release files / nanopb-0.4.8.dev1410-py2.py3-none-any.whl

Download URL nanopb-0.4.8.dev1410-py2.py3-none-any.whl
Size 51.8 kB
Tags Python 2 Python 3
SHA-256 checksum
How to use checksums
40b939389e0da2b15fe1ee01913d53fe215198c2dc78657f40949b5f24045d4b
BLAKE2b-256 checksum
How to use checksums
ce3682b6abac1c7136ab699ae4c69277c4e133e9fe2c563b46e5dc2e410e2ccb
Upload date
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing?
What is trusted publishing?
No
Uploaded via poetry/1.5.1 CPython/3.8.10 Linux/5.15.0-1040-azure

Release history Release notifications | RSS feed

0.4.9

2 release files

0.4.8

2 release files

This release

0.4.7

2 release files

0.4.6

2 release files

0.4.5

2 release files

0.4.4

2 release files

0.4.3

2 release files

0.4.2

2 release files

0.4.1

2 release files

0.4.0

2 release files

Anthropic, PBC Visionary sponsor Bloomberg Visionary sponsor Hudson River Trading Visionary sponsor Meta Visionary sponsor NVIDIA Visionary sponsor Microsoft Sustainability sponsor Depot Continuous Integration AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Monitoring Fastly CDN Google Download Analytics Sentry Error logging StatusPage Status page