gRPC web with Vercel

[lucksp]

We are hosting our web app on Vercel since it's a React app with NextJS. Does this server have any limitation implementing gRPC web? It's just a browser based network request, so it shouldn't...but I assume we still need a proxy? We don't need a node or docker image on our server, correct?

[sampajano]

Thanks for the question! :)

The gRPC-Web JS library is designed to run inside a browser, and would probably not work if you run it for server-side rendering (if i understand correctly about what Next.js does) -- mainly because we rely on XHR and doesn't support fetch() yet (FR at #1134). We also don't yet support Service Workers for the same reason.

But if your question is regarding running a gRPC backend on your Next.js server, i don't have much idea :) But yes, if you do that you'll probably need to run Envoy to proxy gRPC-Web traffic from the browser.

For server use cases, maybe gRPC-node or gRPC-js could work for you, but i'm not an expert. (CC'ing @murgatroid99 in case he has some thoughts on that :))

Hope that helps.. :)