Discord Protocol Buffers

February 28, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

Reverse-engineering Discord's protobufs.

This repository provides protocol buffer files for all protobufs found in Discord's client source, automatically generated and automatically updated. The protobufs are provided as .proto files in the out/ directory.

These protobufs are used by Discord clients for transmitting data like user settings and premium marketing.

Usage

Installation

Note: These packages are automatically updated when changes are detected in the protobufs. As Discord often updates their protobufs, pinning to a specific version may be advisable.

# with npm
npm install discord-protos

# with yarn
yarn add discord-protos

# with pnpm
pnpm add discord-protos

# with pip
pip install discord-protos

Example

JavaScript:

const { PreloadedUserSettings } = require('discord-protos');

const encoded = PreloadedUserSettings.toBase64({
    status: {
        status: {
            value: "online",
        },
        customStatus: {
            text: "Hello World",
            emojiId: 0n,
            emojiName: "",
            expiresAtMs: 0n,
            createdAtMs: 0n,
        },
    },
});

const decoded = PreloadedUserSettings.fromBase64(encoded);

console.log(encoded, decoded);

Python:

import base64

from google.protobuf.json_format import ParseDict
from discord_protos import PreloadedUserSettings

settings = PreloadedUserSettings()
payload = ParseDict({
    'status': {
        'status': 'online',
        'custom_status': {
            'text': 'Hello World',
        },
    },
}, settings).SerializeToString()

encoded = base64.b64encode(payload).decode('ascii')
decoded = PreloadedUserSettings.FromString(base64.b64decode(encoded))

print(encoded, decoded, sep='\n')

The following table shows which protobuf user settings correspond to which .proto file (the Python package also provides a UserSettingsType enum for convenience).

TypeValueFileUse
1PRELOADED_USER_SETTINGSPreloadedUserSettings.protoGeneral Discord user settings.
2FRECENCY_AND_FAVORITES_SETTINGSFrecencyUserSettings.protoFrecency and favorites storage for various things.
3TEST_SETTINGS-Unknown.

See Userdoccers for more information.

Development

Running pnpm load will extract and save the latest protobufs to the discord_protos/ directory.