How to upload an image to Google Cloud Storage from an image url in Node?

To add onto Yevgen Safronov's answer, we can pipe the request into the write stream without explicitly downloading the image into the local file system.

const request = require('request');
const storage = require('@google-cloud/storage')();

function saveToStorage(attachmentUrl, bucketName, objectName) {
  const req = request(attachmentUrl);
  req.pause();
  req.on('response', res => {

    // Don't set up the pipe to the write stream unless the status is ok.
    // See https://stackoverflow.com/a/26163128/2669960 for details.
    if (res.statusCode !== 200) {
      return;
    }

    const writeStream = storage.bucket(bucketName).file(objectName)
      .createWriteStream({

        // Tweak the config options as desired.
        gzip: true,
        public: true,
        metadata: {
          contentType: res.headers['content-type']
        }
      });
    req.pipe(writeStream)
      .on('finish', () => console.log('saved'))
      .on('error', err => {
        writeStream.end();
        console.error(err);
      });

    // Resume only when the pipe is set up.
    req.resume();
  });
  req.on('error', err => console.error(err));
}

I used the request library and storage library for make it. The code below is in TypeScript. Regards

import * as gcs from '@google-cloud/storage';
import {Storage} from '@google-cloud/storage';
import request from 'request';

private _storage: Storage;

constructor() {
    // example of json path: ../../config/google-cloud/google-storage.json
    this._storage = new gcs.Storage({keyFilename: 'JSON Config Path'});
}

public saveFileFromUrl(path: string): Promise<string> {
    return new Promise<any>((resolve, reject) => {
        request({url: path, encoding: null}, (err, res, buffer) => {
            if (res.statusCode !== 200) {
                reject(err);
            }
            const bucketName = 'bucket_name';
            const destination = `bucket location and file name`; // example: 'test/image.jpg'
            const file = this._storage.bucket(bucketName).file(destination);
            // put the image public
            file.save(buffer, {public: true, gzip: true}).then(data => {
                resolve(`${bucketName}/${destination}`)
            }).catch(err => {
                reject(err);
            });
        });
    })
}

Incase of handling image uploads from a remote url. In reference to the latest library provided by Google docs. Instead of storing the buffer of image. We can directly send it to storage.

function sendUploadUrlToGCS(req, res, next) {
  if (!req.body.url) {
    return next();
  }

  var gcsname = Date.now() + '_name.jpg';
  var file = bucket.file(gcsname);

  return request({url: <remote-image-url>, encoding: null}, function(err, response, buffer) {
    req.file = {};
    var stream = file.createWriteStream({
      metadata: {
        contentType: response.headers['content-type']
      }
    });

    stream.on('error', function(err) {
       req.file.cloudStorageError = err;
       console.log(err);
       next(err);
    });

    stream.on('finish', function() {
      req.file.cloudStorageObject = gcsname;
      req.file.cloudStoragePublicUrl = getPublicUrl(gcsname);
      next();
    });

    stream.end(buffer);
  });
}

It's a 2 steps process:

  • Download file locally using request or fetch.
  • Upload to GCL with the official library.

    var fs = require('fs');
    var gcloud = require('gcloud');
    
    // Authenticating on a per-API-basis. You don't need to do this if you auth on a
    // global basis (see Authentication section above).
    
    var gcs = gcloud.storage({
      projectId: 'my-project',
      keyFilename: '/path/to/keyfile.json'
    });
    
    // Create a new bucket.
    gcs.createBucket('my-new-bucket', function(err, bucket) {
      if (!err) {
        // "my-new-bucket" was successfully created.
      }
    });
    
    // Reference an existing bucket.
    var bucket = gcs.bucket('my-existing-bucket');                
    var localReadStream = fs.createReadStream('/photos/zoo/zebra.jpg');
    var remoteWriteStream = bucket.file('zebra.jpg').createWriteStream();
    localReadStream.pipe(remoteWriteStream)
      .on('error', function(err) {})
      .on('finish', function() {
        // The file upload is complete.
      });
    

If you would like to save the file as a jpeg image, you will need to edit the remoteWriteStream stream and add custom metadata:

var image = bucket.file('zebra.jpg');
localReadStream.pipe(image.createWriteStream({
    metadata: {
      contentType: 'image/jpeg',
      metadata: {
        custom: 'metadata'
      }
    }
}))

I found this while digging through this documentation