Google Credentials Helper

nodejs library to help with GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS on Heroku and clouds other then google

Why I created this library: TLDR;

Initially I wrote this library for myself and later I decided to open it for others, when I tried to use google apis in my nodejs server there was no way to pass the credentials directly as we can so in rest pai calls (it turned out there was a way before to pass config in client library initialization but later on it was pronounced deprecated) Google forced us to put the path of their service_account.json file in environment variable insted of the the service account json itself which I donot understand and lots of other people complaining about that. in local machine it worked fine I saved service account json in a folder and saved its path in env vars but when it came to deploy on heroku it was a real problem, because my github repo was public and I was not willing to add service account json in the repo even if it was private because you never know at that point I googled what other people doing for this problem, and I found this article in which the guy created a heroku buildpack to get service account data from env vars and create a json file on the root of the project on heroku this approach is pretty obvious and I used his buildpack at that time but later I realised that this approach will not work on other platforms if someday I migrate to someother cloud provider probably aws, I will endup at the same place as before because heroku buildpack is not going to work anywhere else but only on heroku. so I wrote this library which will do the same thing what they are doing with buildpack but through npm library so it will work anywhere without any change is codebase

Installation:

npm i google-credentials-helper

or

npm i https://github.com/malikasinger1/google-credentials-helper

Usage:

Setting Environment Variables:

In local machine You must have to have Environment variable like this:

export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS="google-credentials.json"

export GOOGLE_CREDENTIALS='{
  "type": "service_account",
  "project_id": "abc-project-id",
  "private_key_id": "6153365dad9d1...84b54867896b20a",
  "private_key": "-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----\nMIIEvg...ERNeAoD\n-----END PRIVATE KEY-----\n",
  "client_email": "dialogflow-client-service-acco@abc-project-id.iam.gserviceaccount.com",
  "client_id": "11121892...183973207",
  "auth_uri": "https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth",
  "token_uri": "https://oauth2.googleapis.com/token",
  "auth_provider_x509_cert_url": "https://www.googleapis.com/oauth2/v1/certs",
  "client_x509_cert_url": "https://www.googleapis.com/robot/v1/metadata/x509/dialogflow-client-service-acco%40abc-project-id.iam.gserviceaccount.com"
}'

In heroku it should look like this:

ES6 code

import gcHelper from "google-credentials-helper"

gcHelper();

ES5 code

const gcHelper = require("google-credentials-helper")

gcHelper();

Example Project:

to see this library in action, checkout this project:

Dialogflow Integration with React App

in this example project check server.mjs file on the root of the project to see how the library is imported and initialized, line# 4 and line# 7 respectively

Feedback

please feel free to contact me on [email protected]
or create an issue to improve this library
pull requests are always welcomed

Thanks,
Malik.