Google Cloud Storage

What it does

Google Cloud Storage is an online data storage platform that we chose to use for our file hosting since we were allowed $300 dollars worth of hosting for free. GCS was a stand out choice since it seemed easy enough to integrate with a single API.

Where we used it

• images.js

How

GCS was mostly incorporated following the vendor guide with some small modifications to suit our needs.

Of particular note is the snippet:

const storage = new Storage({
    projectId: GCLOUD_PROJECT,
    credentials: {
        client_email: GCLOUD_CLIENT_EMAIL,
        private_key: GCLOUD_PRIVATE_KEY.replace(/\\n/g, '\n'),
    },
});

The example code provided by Google expects a keyFile in order to authenticate the application. Not being able to and not willing to store a credentials file on our production server, the workaround was to store the necessary credentials in environment variables. This includes a multi-line private-key stored as a one-liner. Before submitting the required credentials to Google for verification, the escaped \n must be replaced with newlines.