Setting up environment variables in node, specifically, GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS

Question

I have a node application and I'm trying to use the google language api. I want to set the environment variable GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS to the json file in the same directory (sibling to package.json and app.js).

I had tried process.env.GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS = "./key.json"; in my app.js file (using express), but it isn't working. I have also tried putting "GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS":"./key.json" in my package.json and that didn't work as well. It DOES work when I run in the terminal export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS="./key".

Here is the error message:

ERROR: Error: Unexpected error while acquiring application default credentials: Could not load the default credentials. Browse to https://developers.google.com/accounts/docs/application-default-credentials for more information.

Any tips are appreciated, thanks!

Answer 1

After reading and reading about this issue on the internet, the only way to resolve this issue for me was to declare the environment variable for the node execution:

GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS="./key.json" node index.js

Because I was able to print the token from my server console, but when I was running the node application, the library was unable to retrieve the system environment value, but setting the variable for the execution, it was able to retrieve the value.

Answer 2

Just to update this thread. Relative paths with GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS now works fine with dotenv :)

Just store your service-account credentials as a file in your project and reference it relative to your env-file as a path. Then it should work fine :)