Piping requests using gaxios (or axios)

Question

At present I'm performing the trick of piping a request req to a destination url, and piping the response back to res, like so:

const request = require('request');

const url = 'http://some.url.com' + req.originalUrl;
const destination = request(url);

// pipe req to destination...
const readableA = req.pipe(destination);
readableA.on('end', function () {
    // do optional stuff on end
});

// pipe response to res...
const readableB = readableA.pipe(res);
readableB.on('end', function () {
    // do optional stuff on end
});

Since request is now officially deprecated (boo hoo), is this trick at all possible using the gaxios library? I thought that setting responseType: 'stream' on the request would do something similar as above, but it doesn't seem to work.

SImilarly, can gaxios be used in the following context:

request
.get('https://some.data.com')
.on('error', function(err) {
    console.log(err);
})
.pipe(unzipper.Parse())
.on('entry', myEntryHandlerFunction);

Answer 1

Install gaxios:

npm install gaxios

And then use request with the Readable type specified and with responseType set to 'stream'.

// script.ts

import { request } from 'gaxios';

(await(request<Readable>({
  url: 'https://some.data.com',
  responseType: 'stream'
}))
.data)
.on('error', function(err) {
    console.log(err);
})
.pipe(unzipper.Parse())
.on('entry', myEntryHandlerFunction);

// first-example.ts

import { request } from 'gaxios';

// pipe req to destination...
const readableA = (await request<Readable>({
  url: 'http://some.url.com',
  method: 'POST',
  data: req, // suppose `req` is a readable stream
  responseType: 'stream'
})).data;
readableA.on('end', function () {
    // do optional stuff on end
});

// pipe response to res...
const readableB = readableA.pipe(res);
readableB.on('end', function () {
    // do optional stuff on end
});

Gaxios is a stable tool and is used in official Google API client libraries. It's based on the stable node-fetch. And it goes with TypeScript definitions out of the box. I switched to it from the deprecated request and from the plain node-fetch library.