Javascript – Error when uploading a picture Firebase: “TypeError [ERR_INVALID_ARG_VALUE]”

Problem:

I’m facing an issue while trying to upload a picture using the following code in my Node.js application:

// Controller function for uploading pictures
const uploadPicture = async (req, res) => {
  try {
    const { xId } = req.params;
    const file = req.file;

    if (!file) {
      return res.status(400).send("No file uploaded.");
    }

    // Define the bucket file name
    const bucketFileName = `x/${xId}/${file.originalname}`;

    await bucket.upload(file.buffer, {
      gzip: true,
      destination: bucketFileName, // Use the defined bucketFileName
      metadata: {
        cacheControl: "public, max-age=31536000",
        contentType: file.mimetype,
      },
    });

    const pictureData = {
      x: xId,
      path: `gs://${bucket.name}/${bucketFileName}`,
    };

    // Save the picture data to the Firestore database
    await db
      .collection("users")
      .doc("x")
      .update({
        comments: admin.firestore.FieldValue.arrayUnion(pictureData),
      });

    res.status(200).send("Picture uploaded successfully.");
  } catch (error) {
    console.error("Error:", error);
    res.status(500).send("Internal Server Error");
  }
};

I’m getting the following error message in my application:

Error: TypeError [ERR_INVALID_ARG_VALUE]: The argument ‘path’ must be a string or Uint8Array without null bytes. Received <Buffer …>

(Console log of file is also included in the error description)

It seems that this error is related to the “path” argument when trying to upload a picture. The file object contains the following information:

{
  fieldname: 'file',
  originalname: 'example-preview(11).png',
  encoding: '7bit',
  mimetype: 'image/png',
  buffer: <Buffer 89 50 4e 47 ... 10133 more bytes>,
  size: 10133
}

I’m not sure why this error is occurring, and I would appreciate any insights or suggestions on how to resolve this issue.

Solution:

As you can see from the API documentation, Bucket.upload doesn’t take a buffer. It takes a string path to a file. If you have a buffer to upload, you should use File.save() instead.

See also:

• Uploading a buffer to google cloud storage