protoc-gen-go-grpc: program not found or is not executable

If you haven't done, so you need to install the protoc-gen-go plugin like so:

go get github.com/golang/protobuf/protoc-gen-go

this will install the plugin (if your GOPATH is ${HOME}/go) to:

${HOME}/go/bin/protoc-gen-go

Then when running protoc, either update your path, or set it dynamically like so:

PATH="${PATH}:${HOME}/go/bin" protoc ...

OK, just found out, as per https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf-go/releases/tag/v1.20.0

The v1.20 protoc-gen-go does not support generating gRPC service definitions. In the future, gRPC service generation will be supported by a new protoc-gen-go-grpc plugin provided by the Go gRPC project.

The github.com/golang/protobuf version of protoc-gen-go continues to support gRPC and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

EDIT 29/05/2020:

Following an update from @Mark in the comments, according to the Tracking issue on github, protoc-gen-go-grpc has now been merged. However, according to the same issue:

Even with this merged, it is unreleased (v0.0) and subject to change. We do plan to add a requirement that the Unimplemented service implementation be included in all registered services, with an escape hatch in the form of a command-line arg as suggested by @neild.

The Golang Protobuf has released a new version of Go protocol buffers which they are calling it as the APIv2.

Because APIv2 is not backwards compatible with APIv1, therefore we will need to adapt all our Golang code for the new API.

You can learn more about the new API here and here

Migration steps:

In order to run the new code generation will be necessary to install the following gRPC gen plugins:

go get -u google.golang.org/protobuf/cmd/protoc-gen-go
go install google.golang.org/protobuf/cmd/protoc-gen-go

go get -u google.golang.org/grpc/cmd/protoc-gen-go-grpc
go install google.golang.org/grpc/cmd/protoc-gen-go-grpc

Then use the following command to generate the code.

  # generate the messages
 protoc --go_out="$GO_GEN_PATH" -I "$dependecies" "$proto"

 # generate the services
 protoc --go-grpc_out="$GO_GEN_PATH" -I "$dependecies" "$proto"

the missing plugin has been implemented at https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go.

command below should fix it

go install google.golang.org/grpc/cmd/protoc-gen-go-grpc@latest