With the Registry API, Google provides the open source community with an experimental approach to organizing information via APIs. The company wants to support developers in avoiding inconsistencies and duplicates of existing APIs.

Order in chaos The Registry API is designed to enable teams to upload and share machine-readable descriptions of APIs that are in use and under development. These descriptions include API specifications in standard formats such as OpenAPI, the Google API Discovery Service Format and the Protocol Buffers Language.

According to the blog post, such a collection of API descriptions could be a good basis for further tools and services that are supposed to make APIs better and easier to use. In this way, for example, Linter code analysis tools can verify that APIs follow a standard pattern. Documentation generators provide documentation that is easy to read and in an accessible format. Code generators create API clients and server scaffolding. APIs can be searched for and found using the registry API and the online catalog it contains. In addition, the consolidation of all API information in one place should strengthen the consistency of an API portfolio.

A look under the hood Under the hood is a gRPC (Remote Procedure Call) service, which is formally described by Protocol Buffers and which closely follows the Google API design guidelines under aip.dev (API Improvement Proposals). The registry API supports gRPC-HTTP / JSON transcoding, which ensures that it can be automatically published as a JSON-REST API using a proxy. Proxies also enable gRPC Web, which means that gRPC calls can be made directly from browser-based applications. The project also includes an experimental GraphQL interface.

More information on the registry API for Google’s open source projects can be found in the company’s open source blog.

(mdo)