Buf CLI

Buf CLI / Detect breaking changes

Breaking change detection – Overview

This document provides an overview of Buf's breaking change detection. At every step of the development process, starting from developer IDEs and culminating in the Buf Schema Registry's server-wide enforcement, breaking change detection ensures that your organization can evolve Protobuf schemas quickly and safely.

Protobuf has many ways to evolve schemas without breaking existing code. Many of Buf's lint rules are designed to maximize your evolution options to do exactly that. However, sometimes it's a better choice to make a breaking change rather than go to the extra effort of backwards compatibility. If you have few clients and can easily update and deploy them, it may be perfectly okay to break your schemas. And if you have a public API or too many clients to easily update, you should probably avoid breaking them.

Whichever path you choose, Buf's breaking change detection allows you to make informed decisions, while removing the need for constant vigilance during code review. It reliably and mechanically identifies breaking changes so you and your team can focus on making an informed decision about whether to allow them or not.

We recommend completing the Buf CLI tour for an introduction to the buf breaking command.

Key concepts

Buf's breaking change detection evaluates your schemas' compatibility at three phases of development:

During development: You can integrate with your editor for immediate feedback as you're iterating, and also spot-check by running buf breaking.
In code review: You can integrate with your CI/CD workflows (like GitHub Actions) to ensure that breaking changes get flagged directly in your review flow.
When shipping to the Buf Schema Registry (BSR), where it's available to other teams and downstream systems like Kafka. The BSR lets your organization set a server-wide breaking change policy that prevents unintended breaking changes from being committed to the BSR. Instead, they go to a review flow so that the module owners can review them before they enter your production environment.

It's designed to provide a tight feedback loop:

Editor integration provides instantaneous feedback as you work, even in large projects. Speed is directly proportional to the input size, so linting a single file only takes a few milliseconds.
Detailed error messages in file:line:column:message format pinpoint the location of the breaking change, including when references move across files.

buf breaking runs a set of compatibility checks comparing the current version of your Protobuf schema to a past version. The past version can be any type of input that the Buf CLI accepts, such as a BSR module, a GitHub repo, or a Buf image.

Rules and categories

The checker's rules are split up into logical categories depending on the nature of the breaking changes, so choosing a strictness level is straightforward. We recommend using one of the predefined categories, but rules can also be selected individually to match more unusual policies. See the rules and categories page for detailed information.

The configuration categories, from strictest to most lenient, are:

FILE: Detects generated source code breakage on a per-file basis (Default)
PACKAGE: Detects generated source code breakage on a per-package basis
WIRE_JSON: Detects breakage to wire (binary) or JSON encoding
WIRE: Detects breakage to wire (binary) encoding

Changes that pass breaking change detection under a stricter policy also pass with all less-strict policies. For example, passing the FILE rules means you will pass the PACKAGE rules.

Defaults and configuration

You configure breaking change detection in the buf.yaml configuration file, which is placed at the root of the Protobuf source files it defines. If the input doesn't contain a buf.yaml file, the Buf CLI operates as if there's a buf.yaml file with these default values:

buf.yaml

version: v1
breaking:
  use:
    - FILE

Below is an example of each buf breaking configuration option. For more information on specific options and the rules and categories, see the buf.yaml reference and the rules and categories page.

buf.yaml

version: v1
breaking:
  use:
    - FILE
  except:
    - RPC_NO_DELETE
  ignore:
    - foo/bar.proto
  ignore_only:
    FIELD_SAME_JSON_NAME:
      - baz
  ignore_unstable_packages: true

Integration with CI/CD workflows

Because buf breaking is part of a CLI, you can easily integrate it into CI/CD workflows. For instructions, see the General CI/CD setup and GitHub Actions pages.

Usage examples

The most basic usage of buf breaking is to check your local files against your local Git repository. However, both the input and the schema you're checking against can be specified in multiple ways, so you can use buf breaking in many types of workflows.

Git and GitHub

Check out Buf's dedicated GitHub Actions to seamlessly add breaking change detection into your CI/CD pipeline.

Local repositories

You can directly compare against the .proto files at the head of a git branch or a git tag. See the inputs documentation for details on git branches and git tags. This is what the example in step 2 does, and it's especially useful for iterating on your schema locally.

Remote repositories

Note that many CI services like Travis CI don't do a full clone of your repo, instead cloning a certain number of commits (typically around 50) on the specific branch that's being tested. In this scenario, other branches aren't present in your clone within CI, so the local example above doesn't work. You can fix this by giving the remote path directly to the Buf CLI so it can clone the repo itself, for example against https://github.com/foo/bar.git:

$ buf breaking --against 'https://github.com/foo/bar.git'

It only clones the single commit at the HEAD of the branch, so even for large repositories, this should be quick.

For remote locations that require authentication, see HTTPS Authentication and SSH Authentication for details.

Using tags

You can compare against a git tag, for example v1.0.0:

$ buf breaking --against '.git#tag=v1.0.0'

Within subdirectories

You can compare against a subdirectory in your git repository. For example, if your buf.yaml is stored in the subdirectory proto:

$ buf breaking --against '.git#tag=v1.0.0,subdir=proto'

Buf Schema Registry module

If you're already using the BSR in your Protobuf workflow, then comparing your local module against the version stored in the BSR is the most common use case.

$ buf breaking --against <REMOTE>/<ORGANIZATION>/<MODULE>

Example

$ buf breaking --against buf.build/acme/petapis

Archives (`.tar` and `.zip`)

You can compare against tarballs and zip archives of your .proto files as well. This is especially useful for GitHub where they can be retrieved for any commit or branch. This example assumes your repo is github.com/foo/bar and COMMIT is a variable storing the commit to compare against:

$ buf breaking --against "https://github.com/foo/bar/archive/${COMMIT}.tar.gz#strip_components=1"
$ buf breaking --against "https://github.com/foo/bar/archive/${COMMIT}.zip#strip_components=1"

Output as JSON

You can also output the errors as JSON. The output defaults to a single-line comma-separated message, but can be piped to other tools for formatting. For example, you can send the output to jq:

$ buf breaking --against '.git#branch=main' --error-format=json | jq .
Output{
  "path":"acme/pet/v1/pet.proto",
  "start_line":18,
  "start_column":3,
  "end_line":18,
  "end_column":9,
  "type":"FIELD_SAME_TYPE",
  "message":"Field \"1\" on message \"Pet\" changed type from \"enum\" to \"string\"."
}

Limit to specific files

By default, the Buf CLI builds all files under the buf.yaml configuration file. Instead, you can manually specify the file or directory paths to check. This is an advanced feature intended to be used for editor or Bazel integration. In general, it's better to let the Buf CLI discover all files under management and handle this for you, especially when using the FILE category.

Breaking change detection is limited to the given files if the --path flag is specified, as in this command:

$ buf breaking --against .git#branch=main --path path/to/foo.proto --path path/to/bar.proto

You can combine this with an inline configuration override, too:

$ buf breaking --against .git#branch=main --path path/to/foo.proto --path path/to/bar.proto \
  --config '{"version":"v1","breaking":{"use":["WIRE_JSON"]}}'

Advanced use cases

Due to the nature of inputs, buf breaking happily compares just about anything. You may have an advanced use case, so this example demonstrates its ability to compare a git repository against a remote archive.

Copy/paste this into your terminal:

$ buf breaking \
  "https://github.com/googleapis/googleapis.git" \
  --against "https://github.com/googleapis/googleapis/archive/b89f7fa5e7cc64e9e38a59c97654616ad7b5932d.tar.gz#strip_components=1" \
  --config '{"version":"v1","breaking":{"use":["PACKAGE"]}}'
Outputgoogle/cloud/asset/v1/assets.proto:27:1:File option "cc_enable_arenas" changed from "false" to "true".

To explicitly target a branch , you can adapt the command to include branch=<branch_name> in the git input:

$ buf breaking \
  "https://github.com/googleapis/googleapis.git#branch=master" \
  --against "https://github.com/googleapis/googleapis/archive/b89f7fa5e7cc64e9e38a59c97654616ad7b5932d.tar.gz#strip_components=1" \
  --config '{"version":"v1","breaking":{"use":["PACKAGE"]}}'
Outputgoogle/cloud/asset/v1/assets.proto:27:1:File option "cc_enable_arenas" changed from "false" to "true".

Try out breaking change detection with the tutorial
Get detailed explanations of the breaking change rules and categories
Learn about breaking change policy enforcement and the review flow
Browse the buf.yaml configuration file reference and buf breaking command reference
See more about the types of inputs that the Buf CLI accepts