Google API Artifact Manager#

Google API Artifact Manager (artman) is a program used to automate the generation and publishing of API client libraries.

In order to be consumed by artman, APIs require:

  • A Protocol Buffers description of the API, specified using proto3 syntax.
  • A service configuration stub. This is YAML configuration which designates how the API is housed within Google’s infrastructure.
  • A GAPIC configuration. This provides extra information specific to generating a client library.
  • An artman configuration. This is the file artman uses as the entry point, and it points to the previous items in this list.

The artman tool is a wrapper around toolkit; it takes the configuration enumerated above, normalizes it, and sends it to toolkit, which generates a client library on disk, and then artman performs some concluding cleanup.

Client libraries produced in this way are executable “out of the box”, and include basic reference documentation, and appropriate packaging and metadata files.