Error using Create-react-app with googleapis

Question

I am pretty new to React and I followed Heroku's guide to use Create-react-app to create a new react app. I want to use Google APIs to authenticate users through Google's OAuth2 and get the refresh token, so I followed the guide on Google APIs Node Client to install the 'googleapis' package with npm install googleapis --save but after I imported googleapis with import {google} from 'googleapis', I got the following error when I hit npm start:

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot convert undefined or null to object
at Function.getPrototypeOf (<anonymous>)
at ./node_modules/google-p12-pem/node_modules/pify/index.js.module.exports (index.js:75)
at Object../node_modules/google-p12-pem/build/src/index.js (index.js:6)
at __webpack_require__ (bootstrap 8c14a9046e11e185076c:678)
at fn (bootstrap 8c14a9046e11e185076c:88)
at Object../node_modules/gtoken/build/src/index.js (index.js:50)
at __webpack_require__ (bootstrap 8c14a9046e11e185076c:678)
at fn (bootstrap 8c14a9046e11e185076c:88)
at Object../node_modules/google-auth-library/build/src/auth/jwtclient.js (jwtclient.js:63)
at __webpack_require__ (bootstrap 8c14a9046e11e185076c:678)
at fn (bootstrap 8c14a9046e11e185076c:88)
at Object../node_modules/google-auth-library/build/src/auth/googleauth.js (googleauth.js:60)
at __webpack_require__ (bootstrap 8c14a9046e11e185076c:678)
at fn (bootstrap 8c14a9046e11e185076c:88)
at Object../node_modules/google-auth-library/build/src/index.js (index.js:18)
at __webpack_require__ (bootstrap 8c14a9046e11e185076c:678)
at fn (bootstrap 8c14a9046e11e185076c:88)
at Object../node_modules/googleapis/build/src/lib/googleapis.js (googleapis.js:60)
at __webpack_require__ (bootstrap 8c14a9046e11e185076c:678)
at fn (bootstrap 8c14a9046e11e185076c:88)
at Object../node_modules/googleapis/build/src/index.js (index.js:18)
at __webpack_require__ (bootstrap 8c14a9046e11e185076c:678)
at fn (bootstrap 8c14a9046e11e185076c:88)
at Object../src/App.js (App.css?9a66:26)
at __webpack_require__ (bootstrap 8c14a9046e11e185076c:678)
at fn (bootstrap 8c14a9046e11e185076c:88)
at Object../src/index.js (index.css?f255:26)
at __webpack_require__ (bootstrap 8c14a9046e11e185076c:678)
at fn (bootstrap 8c14a9046e11e185076c:88)
at Object.0 (registerServiceWorker.js:117)
at __webpack_require__ (bootstrap 8c14a9046e11e185076c:678)
at ./node_modules/ansi-regex/index.js.module.exports (bootstrap 8c14a9046e11e185076c:724)
at bootstrap 8c14a9046e11e185076c:724

What did I miss that cause this error?

Answer 1

You can use npm module 'gapi-client' instead of 'googleapis'.

Do an

npm install gapi-client

and in your code use like,

import gapi from 'gapi-client';

It works fine and you can use the same examples as mentioned in the google samples like https://developers.google.com/api-client-library/javascript/start/start-js