How-To: Configure Dapr to use gRPC

How to configure Dapr to use gRPC for low-latency, high performance scenarios

Dapr implements both an HTTP and a gRPC API for local calls. gRPC is useful for low-latency, high performance scenarios and has language integration using the proto clients.

You can find a list of auto-generated clients here.

The Dapr runtime implements a proto service that apps can communicate with via gRPC.

In addition to calling Dapr via gRPC, Dapr can communicate with an application via gRPC. To do that, the app needs to host a gRPC server and implements the Dapr appcallback service

Configuring Dapr to communicate with an app via gRPC

Self hosted

When running in self hosted mode, use the --app-protocol flag to tell Dapr to use gRPC to talk to the app:

dapr run --app-protocol grpc --app-port 5005 node app.js

This tells Dapr to communicate with your app via gRPC over port 5005.

Kubernetes

On Kubernetes, set the following annotations in your deployment YAML:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: myapp
  namespace: default
  labels:
    app: myapp
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: myapp
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: myapp
      annotations:
        dapr.io/enabled: "true"
        dapr.io/app-id: "myapp"
        dapr.io/app-protocol: "grpc"
        dapr.io/app-port: "5005"
...

Last modified June 19, 2023: Merge pull request #3565 from dapr/aacrawfi/skip-secrets-close (b1763bf)