mildsunrise/protobuf-inspector

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

1125 stars · 105 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

A Python CLI tool that parses Google Protobuf encoded blobs (wire format 2 or 3) without knowing their schema definition, printing a colored representation of the contents. It guesses message structure automatically and lets users progressively define fields until a full protobuf definition is recovered.

Use cases

• reverse-engineer a protobuf blob without its .proto definition
• decode unknown protocol buffers wire format data
• inspect captured protobuf network traffic
• learn how the protobuf wire format is encoded
• recover a protobuf schema from binary messages
• debug protobuf parsing errors in embedded messages

When to choose

• you have protobuf-encoded binary data but no schema file
• you want to interactively guess field types until a full definition emerges
• you want to understand the raw wire format layout of a message

When to avoid

• you already have the .proto definition and just need a normal decoder
• you need programmatic parsing of known schemas at scale
• you need guaranteed-correct decoding of ambiguous small fields

Facets

cli-tool · maturity maintenance

parser reverse-engineering serialization developer-tools reverse-engineering parsers developer-tools python cli cross-platform protobuf wire-format protocol-buffers binary-analysis command-line

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="mildsunrise/protobuf-inspector")