Writing a tiny tRPC client

January 17, 2023 · 12 min read

tRPC Core Team Member

Ever wondered how tRPC works? Maybe you want to start contributing to the project but you're frightened by the internals? The aim of this post is to familiarize you with the internals of tRPC by writing a minimal client that covers the big parts of how tRPC works.

info

It's recommended that you understand some of the core concepts in TypeScript such as generics, conditional types, the extends keyword and recursion. If you're not familiar with these, I recommend going through Matt Pocock's Beginner TypeScript tutorial to get familiar with these concepts before reading on.

Overview

Let's assume we have a simple tRPC router with three procedures that looks like this:

ts
type Post = { id: string; title: string };
const posts: Post[] = [];
 
const appRouter = router({
  post: router({
    byId: publicProcedure
      .input(z.object({ id: z.string() }))
      .query(({ input }) => {
        const post = posts.find((p) => p.id === input.id);
        if (!post) throw new TRPCError({ code: "NOT_FOUND" });
        return post;
      }),
    byTitle: publicProcedure
      .input(z.object({ title: z.string() }))
      .query(({ input }) => {
        const post = posts.find((p) => p.title === input.title);
        if (!post) throw new TRPCError({ code: "NOT_FOUND" });
        return post;
      }),
    create: publicProcedure
      .input(z.object({ title: z.string() }))
      .mutation(({ input }) => {
        const post = { id: uuid(), ...input };
        posts.push(post);
        return post;
      }),
  }),
});

ts
type Post = { id: string; title: string };
const posts: Post[] = [];
 
const appRouter = router({
  post: router({
    byId: publicProcedure
      .input(z.object({ id: z.string() }))
      .query(({ input }) => {
        const post = posts.find((p) => p.id === input.id);
        if (!post) throw new TRPCError({ code: "NOT_FOUND" });
        return post;
      }),
    byTitle: publicProcedure
      .input(z.object({ title: z.string() }))
      .query(({ input }) => {
        const post = posts.find((p) => p.title === input.title);
        if (!post) throw new TRPCError({ code: "NOT_FOUND" });
        return post;
      }),
    create: publicProcedure
      .input(z.object({ title: z.string() }))
      .mutation(({ input }) => {
        const post = { id: uuid(), ...input };
        posts.push(post);
        return post;
      }),
  }),
});

The goal of our client is to mimic this object structure on our client so that we can call procedures like:

ts
const post1 = await client.post.byId.query({ id: '123' });
const post2 = await client.post.byTitle.query({ title: 'Hello world' });
const newPost = await client.post.create.mutate({ title: 'Foo' });

ts
const post1 = await client.post.byId.query({ id: '123' });
const post2 = await client.post.byTitle.query({ title: 'Hello world' });
const newPost = await client.post.create.mutate({ title: 'Foo' });

To do this, tRPC uses a combination of Proxy-objects and some TypeScript magic to augment the object structure with the .query and .mutate methods on them - meaning we actually LIE to you about what you're doing (more on that later) in order to provide an excellent developer experience!

On a high level, what we want to do is to map post.byId.query() to a GET request to our server, and post.create.mutate() to a POST request, and the types should all be propagated from back to front. So, how do we do this?

Implementing a tiny tRPC client

🧙‍♀️ The TypeScript magic

Let's start with the fun TypeScript magic to unlock the awesome autocompletion and typesafety we all know and love from using tRPC.

We'll need to use recursive types so that we can infer arbitrary deep router structures. Also, we know that we want our procedures post.byId and post.create to have the .query and .mutate methods on them respectively - in tRPC, we call this decorating the procedures. In @trpc/server, we have some inference helpers that will infer the input and output types of our procedures with these resolved methods, which we'll use to infer the types for these functions, so let's write some code!

Let's consider what we want to achieve to provide autocompletion on paths as well as inference of the procedures input and output types:

If we're on a router, we want to be able to access it's sub-routers and procedures. (we'll get to this in a little bit)
If we're on a query procedure, we want to be able to call .query on it.
If we're on a mutation procedure, we want to be able to call .mutate on it.
If we're trying to access anything else, we want to get a type error indicating that procedure doesn't exist on the backend.

So let's create a type that will do this for us:

ts
type DecorateProcedure<TProcedure> = TProcedure extends AnyTRPCQueryProcedure
  ? {
      query: Resolver<TProcedure>;
    }
  : TProcedure extends AnyTRPCMutationProcedure
  ? {
      mutate: Resolver<TProcedure>;
    }
  : never;

ts
type DecorateProcedure<TProcedure> = TProcedure extends AnyTRPCQueryProcedure
  ? {
      query: Resolver<TProcedure>;
    }
  : TProcedure extends AnyTRPCMutationProcedure
  ? {
      mutate: Resolver<TProcedure>;
    }
  : never;

We'll use some of tRPC's built-in inference helpers to infer the input and output types of our procedures to define the Resolver type.

ts
import type {
  AnyTRPCProcedure,
  inferProcedureInput,
  inferProcedureOutput,
  AnyTRPCQueryProcedure,
  AnyTRPCMutationProcedure
} from '@trpc/server';
 
 
 
type Resolver<TProcedure extends AnyTRPCProcedure> = (
  input: inferProcedureInput<TProcedure>,
) => Promise<inferProcedureOutput<TProcedure>>;

ts
import type {
  AnyTRPCProcedure,
  inferProcedureInput,
  inferProcedureOutput,
  AnyTRPCQueryProcedure,
  AnyTRPCMutationProcedure
} from '@trpc/server';
 
 
 
type Resolver<TProcedure extends AnyTRPCProcedure> = (
  input: inferProcedureInput<TProcedure>,
) => Promise<inferProcedureOutput<TProcedure>>;

Let's try this out on our post.byId procedure:

ts
type PostById = Resolver<AppRouter['post']['byId']>;
        type PostById = (input: {
    id: string;
}) => Promise<Post>

ts
type PostById = Resolver<AppRouter['post']['byId']>;
        type PostById = (input: {
    id: string;
}) => Promise<Post>

Nice, that's what we expected - we can now call .query on our procedure and get the correct input and output types inferred!

Finally, we'll create a type that will recursively traverse the router and decorate all procedures along the way:

ts
import type { TRPCRouterRecord } from "@trpc/server";
import type { AnyTRPCRouter } from "@trpc/server";
 
type DecorateRouterRecord<TRecord extends TRPCRouterRecord> = {
  [TKey in keyof TRecord]: TRecord[TKey] extends infer $Value
    ? $Value extends TRPCRouterRecord
      ? DecorateRouterRecord<$Value>
      : $Value extends AnyTRPCProcedure
      ? DecorateProcedure<$Value>
      : never
    : never;
};

ts
import type { TRPCRouterRecord } from "@trpc/server";
import type { AnyTRPCRouter } from "@trpc/server";
 
type DecorateRouterRecord<TRecord extends TRPCRouterRecord> = {
  [TKey in keyof TRecord]: TRecord[TKey] extends infer $Value
    ? $Value extends TRPCRouterRecord
      ? DecorateRouterRecord<$Value>
      : $Value extends AnyTRPCProcedure
      ? DecorateProcedure<$Value>
      : never
    : never;
};

Let's digest this type a bit:

We pass a TRPCRouterRecord to the type as a generic, which is a type containing all the procedures and sub-routers that exists on a tRPC router.
We iterate over the keys of the record, which are the procedure or router names, and do the following:
- If the key maps to a router, we recursively call the type on that router's procedure record, which will decorate all the procedures in that router. This will provide autocompletion as we traverse the path.
- If the key maps to a procedure, we decorate the procedure using the DecorateProcedure type we created earlier.
- If the key doesn't map to a procedure or router, we assign the never type which is like saying "this key doesn't exist" which will cause a type error if we try to access it.

🤯 The Proxy remapping

Now that we got all the types setup, we need to actually implement the functionality which will augment the server's router definition on the client so we can invoke the procedures like normal functions.

We'll first create a helper function for creating recursive proxies - createRecursiveProxy:

info

This is almost the exact implementation used in production, with the exception that we aren't handling some edge cases. See for yourself!

ts
interface ProxyCallbackOptions {
  path: readonly string[];
  args: readonly unknown[];
}
 
type ProxyCallback = (opts: ProxyCallbackOptions) => unknown;
 
function createRecursiveProxy(callback: ProxyCallback, path: readonly string[]) {
  const proxy: unknown = new Proxy(
    () => {
      // dummy no-op function since we don't have any
      // client-side target we want to remap to
    },
    {
      get(_obj, key) {
        if (typeof key !== 'string') return undefined;
 
        // Recursively compose the full path until a function is invoked
        return createRecursiveProxy(callback, [...path, key]);
      },
      apply(_1, _2, args) {
        // Call the callback function with the entire path we
        // recursively created and forward the arguments
        return callback({
          path,
          args,
        });
      },
    },
  );
 
  return proxy;
}

ts
interface ProxyCallbackOptions {
  path: readonly string[];
  args: readonly unknown[];
}
 
type ProxyCallback = (opts: ProxyCallbackOptions) => unknown;
 
function createRecursiveProxy(callback: ProxyCallback, path: readonly string[]) {
  const proxy: unknown = new Proxy(
    () => {
      // dummy no-op function since we don't have any
      // client-side target we want to remap to
    },
    {
      get(_obj, key) {
        if (typeof key !== 'string') return undefined;
 
        // Recursively compose the full path until a function is invoked
        return createRecursiveProxy(callback, [...path, key]);
      },
      apply(_1, _2, args) {
        // Call the callback function with the entire path we
        // recursively created and forward the arguments
        return callback({
          path,
          args,
        });
      },
    },
  );
 
  return proxy;
}

This looks a bit magical, what does this do?

The get method handles property accesses such as post.byId. The key is the property name we're accessing, so when we type post our key will be post, and when we type post.byId our key will be byId. The recursive proxy combines all of these keys into a final path, e.g. ["post", "byId", "query"], that we can use to determine the URL we want to send a request to.
The apply method is called when we invoke a function on the proxy, such as .query(args). The args is the arguments we pass to the function, so when we call post.byId.query(args) our args will be our input, which we'll provide as query parameters or request body depending on the type of procedure. The createRecursiveProxy takes in a callback function which we'll map the apply to with the path and args.

Below is a visual representation of how the proxy works on the call trpc.post.byId.query({ id: 1 }):

proxy

🧩 Putting it all together

Now that we have this helper and know what it does, let's use it to create our client. We'll provide the createRecursiveProxy a callback that will take the path and args and request the server using fetch. We'll need to add a generic to the function that will accept any tRPC router type (AnyTRPCRouter), and then we'll cast the return type to the DecorateRouterRecord type we created earlier:

ts
import { TRPCResponse } from '@trpc/server/rpc';
 
export const createTinyRPCClient = <TRouter extends AnyTRPCRouter>(
  baseUrl: string,
) =>
  createRecursiveProxy(async (opts) => {
    const path = [...opts.path]; // e.g. ["post", "byId", "query"]
    const method = path.pop()! as 'query' | 'mutate';
    const dotPath = path.join('.'); // "post.byId" - this is the path procedures have on the backend
    let uri = `${baseUrl}/${dotPath}`;
 
    const [input] = opts.args;
    const stringifiedInput = input !== undefined && JSON.stringify(input);
    let body: undefined | string = undefined;
    if (stringifiedInput !== false) {
      if (method === 'query') {
        uri += `?input=${encodeURIComponent(stringifiedInput)}`;
      } else {
        body = stringifiedInput;
      }
    }
 
    const json: TRPCResponse = await fetch(uri, {
      method: method === 'query' ? 'GET' : 'POST',
      headers: {
        'Content-Type': 'application/json',
      },
      body,
    }).then((res) => res.json());
 
    if ('error' in json) {
      throw new Error(`Error: ${json.error.message}`);
    }
    // No error - all good. Return the data.
    return json.result.data;
  }, []) as DecorateRouterRecord<TRouter['_def']['record']>;
//   ^? provide empty array as path to begin with

ts
import { TRPCResponse } from '@trpc/server/rpc';
 
export const createTinyRPCClient = <TRouter extends AnyTRPCRouter>(
  baseUrl: string,
) =>
  createRecursiveProxy(async (opts) => {
    const path = [...opts.path]; // e.g. ["post", "byId", "query"]
    const method = path.pop()! as 'query' | 'mutate';
    const dotPath = path.join('.'); // "post.byId" - this is the path procedures have on the backend
    let uri = `${baseUrl}/${dotPath}`;
 
    const [input] = opts.args;
    const stringifiedInput = input !== undefined && JSON.stringify(input);
    let body: undefined | string = undefined;
    if (stringifiedInput !== false) {
      if (method === 'query') {
        uri += `?input=${encodeURIComponent(stringifiedInput)}`;
      } else {
        body = stringifiedInput;
      }
    }
 
    const json: TRPCResponse = await fetch(uri, {
      method: method === 'query' ? 'GET' : 'POST',
      headers: {
        'Content-Type': 'application/json',
      },
      body,
    }).then((res) => res.json());
 
    if ('error' in json) {
      throw new Error(`Error: ${json.error.message}`);
    }
    // No error - all good. Return the data.
    return json.result.data;
  }, []) as DecorateRouterRecord<TRouter['_def']['record']>;
//   ^? provide empty array as path to begin with

Most notably here is that our path is .-separated instead of /. This allows us to have a single API handler on the server which will process all requests, and not one for each procedure. If you're using a framework with filebased routing such as Next.js, you might recognize the catchall /api/trpc/[trpc].ts file which will match all procedure paths.

We also have a TRPCResponse type annotation on the fetch-request. This determines the JSONRPC-compliant response format that the server responds with. You can read more on that here. TL;DR, we get back either a result or an error object, which we can use to determine if the request was successful or not and do appropriate error handling if something went wrong.

And that's it! This is all the code you'll need to call your tRPC procedures on your client as if they were local functions. On the surface, it looks like we're just calling the publicProcedure.query / mutation's resolver function via normal property accesses, but we're actually crossing a network boundary so we can use server-side libraries such as Prisma without leaking database credentials.

Trying it out!

Now, create the client and provide it your server's url and you'll get full autocompletion and type safety when you call your procedures!

ts
const url = 'http://localhost:3000/api/trpc';
const client = createTinyRPCClient<AppRouter>(url);
 
// 🧙‍♀️ magic autocompletion
client.post.b;
             byId
byTitle
//
 
// 👀 fully typesafe
const post = await client.post.byId.query({ id: '123' });
       const post: {
    id: string;
    title: string;
}

ts
const url = 'http://localhost:3000/api/trpc';
const client = createTinyRPCClient<AppRouter>(url);
 
// 🧙‍♀️ magic autocompletion
client.post.b;
             byId
byTitle
//
 
// 👀 fully typesafe
const post = await client.post.byId.query({ id: '123' });
       const post: {
    id: string;
    title: string;
}

The full code for the client can be found here, and tests showing the usage here.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this article and learned something about how tRPC works. You should probably not use this to in favor of @trpc/client which is only a couple of KBs bigger - it comes with a lot more flexibility than what we're showcasing here:

Query options for abort signals, ssr etc...
Links
Procedure batching
WebSockets / subscriptions
Nice error handling
Data transformers
Edge cases handling like when we don't get a tRPC-compliant response

We also didn't cover much of the server-side of things today, maybe we'll cover that in a future article. If you have any questions, feel free to bug me on Twitter.

Overview​

Implementing a tiny tRPC client​

🧙‍♀️ The TypeScript magic​

🤯 The Proxy remapping​

🧩 Putting it all together​

Trying it out!​

Conclusion​