How to download file from Google Cloud Storage?

Question

I'm following up on this article to download objects from GCP Cloud storage bucket: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/downloading-objects#storage-download-object-nodejs

const {Storage} = require('@google-cloud/storage');

// Creates a client
const storage = new Storage();

async function downloadIntoMemory() {
  // Downloads the file into a buffer in memory.
  const contents = await storage.bucket(bucketName).file(fileName).download();

 return contents;
  );
}

downloadIntoMemory().catch(console.error);

I'm currently getting a buffer data in contents. I've this code hooked upto a API on NodeJS backend. I'm using React Typescript on frontend. Calling the API, gives me data buffer. How can I use it to download the file instead of the data buffer?

I tried the above method explicitly providing file destination, but I'm still getting the following error: EISDIR: illegal operation on a directory, open '{file_path_which_i_was_set}. Err: -21

Answer 1

As rightly pointed out by @John Hanley, you are referring to the documentation, where the code sample downloads an object into memory/ buffer in memory. If you want to download an object from a bucket to a file, refer to this code sample, where the ‘options’ parameter has to be passed to the download() method. The code goes like this :

// The ID of your GCS bucket
const bucketName = 'your-unique-bucket-name';

// The ID of your GCS file
const fileName = 'your-file-name';

// The path to which the file should be downloaded
const destFileName = '/local/path/to/file.txt';

// Imports the Google Cloud client library
const {Storage} = require('@google-cloud/storage');

// Creates a client
const storage = new Storage();

async function downloadFile() {
  const options = {
    destination: destFileName,
  };

  // Downloads the file to the destination file path
  await storage.bucket(bucketName).file(fileName).download(options);

  console.log(
    `gs://${bucketName}/${fileName} downloaded to ${destFileName}.`
  );
}

downloadFile().catch(console.error);