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Changing protoc versions

Sometimes, it may not be possible to use the version of protoc that is available on Maven. If you are in this situation, a few alternatives exist.

Using protoc from your system path

If you need to use the version of protoc that is installed on your system, specify the version as PATH.

<plugin>
  <groupId>io.github.ascopes</groupId>
  <version>...</version>

  <configuration>
    <protocVersion>PATH</protocVersion>
  </configuration>

  ...
</plugin>

On Linux, MacOS, and other POSIX-like operating systems, this will read the $PATH environment variable and search for a binary named protoc case-sensitively. The executable MUST be executable by the current user (i.e. chomd +x /path/to/protoc), otherwise it will be ignored.

On Windows, this will respect the %PATH% environment variable (case insensitive). The path will be searched for files where their name matches protoc case-insensitively, ignoring the file extension. The file extension must match one of the extensions specified in the %PATHEXT% environment variable. The above example would match protoc.exe on Windows, as an example.

Using protoc from a specific path

You may wish to run protoc from a specific path on your file system. If you need to do this, you can provide a URL with the file scheme to reference it:

<plugin>
  <groupId>io.github.ascopes</groupId>
  <artifactId>protobuf-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>...</version>

  <configuration>
    <protocVersion>file:///opt/protoc/protoc.exe</protocVersion>
  </configuration>
</plugin>

The syntax for this is file://$PATH, where $PATH is a relative or absolute path. For Windows, use forward-slashes for this syntax rather than backslashes.

Note that paths are resolved relative to the directory that Maven is invoked from.

Using protoc from a remote server

If you have a protoc binary on a remote FTP or HTTP(S) server, you can provide the URL to download directly:

<plugin>
  <groupId>io.github.ascopes</groupId>
  <artifactId>protobuf-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>...</version>

  <configuration>
    <protocVersion>ftp://company-server.internal/protoc/protoc.exe</protocVersion>
    <!-- or -->
    <protocVersion>http://company-server.internal/protoc/protoc.exe</protocVersion>
    <!-- or -->
    <protocVersion>https://company-server.internal/protoc/protoc.exe</protocVersion>
  </configuration>
</plugin>

This is not recommended outside specific use cases, and care should be taken to ensure the legitimacy and security of any URLs being provided prior to adding them.

Providing authentication details or proxy details is not supported at this time.