How to perform an HTTP file upload using express on Cloud Functions for Firebase (multer, busboy)

Question

I am trying to upload a file to Cloud Functions, using Express to handle requests there, but i am not succeeding. I created a version that works locally:

serverside js

const express = require('express');
const cors = require('cors');
const fileUpload = require('express-fileupload');

const app = express();
app.use(fileUpload());
app.use(cors());

app.post('/upload', (req, res) => {
    res.send('files: ' + Object.keys(req.files).join(', '));
});

clientside js

const formData = new FormData();
Array.from(this.$refs.fileSelect.files).forEach((file, index) => {
    formData.append('sample' + index, file, 'sample');
});

axios.post(
    url,
    formData, 
    {
        headers: { 'Content-Type': 'multipart/form-data' },
    }
);

This exact same code seems to break when deployed to Cloud Functions, where req.files is undefined. Does anyone have any idea what is happening here?

EDIT I also had a go at using multer, which worked fine locally, but once uploaded to Cloud Functions, this got me an empty array (same clientside code):

const app = express();
const upload = multer();
app.use(cors());

app.post('/upload', upload.any(), (req, res) => {
    res.send(JSON.stringify(req.files));
});

Answer 1

There was indeed a breaking change in the Cloud Functions setup that triggered this issue. It has to do with the way the middleware works that gets applied to all Express apps (including the default app) used to serve HTTPS functions. Basically, Cloud Functions will parse the body of the request and decide what to do with it, leaving the raw contents of the body in a Buffer in req.rawBody. You can use this to directly parse your multipart content, but you can't do it with middleware (like multer).

Instead, you can use a module called busboy to deal with the raw body content directly. It can accept the rawBody buffer and will call you back with the files it found. Here is some sample code that will iterate all the uploaded content, save them as files, then delete them. You'll obviously want to do something more useful.

const path = require('path');
const os = require('os');
const fs = require('fs');
const Busboy = require('busboy');

exports.upload = functions.https.onRequest((req, res) => {
    if (req.method === 'POST') {
        const busboy = new Busboy({ headers: req.headers });
        // This object will accumulate all the uploaded files, keyed by their name
        const uploads = {}

        // This callback will be invoked for each file uploaded
        busboy.on('file', (fieldname, file, filename, encoding, mimetype) => {
            console.log(`File [${fieldname}] filename: ${filename}, encoding: ${encoding}, mimetype: ${mimetype}`);
            // Note that os.tmpdir() is an in-memory file system, so should only 
            // be used for files small enough to fit in memory.
            const filepath = path.join(os.tmpdir(), fieldname);
            uploads[fieldname] = { file: filepath }
            console.log(`Saving '${fieldname}' to ${filepath}`);
            file.pipe(fs.createWriteStream(filepath));
        });

        // This callback will be invoked after all uploaded files are saved.
        busboy.on('finish', () => {
            for (const name in uploads) {
                const upload = uploads[name];
                const file = upload.file;
                res.write(`${file}\n`);
                fs.unlinkSync(file);
            }
            res.end();
        });

        // The raw bytes of the upload will be in req.rawBody.  Send it to busboy, and get
        // a callback when it's finished.
        busboy.end(req.rawBody);
    } else {
        // Client error - only support POST
        res.status(405).end();
    }
})

Bear in mind that files saved to temp space occupy memory, so their sizes should be limited to a total of 10MB. For larger files, you should upload those to Cloud Storage and process them with a storage trigger.

Also bear in mind that the default selection of middleware added by Cloud Functions is not currently added to the local emulator via firebase serve. So this sample will not work (rawBody won't be available) in that case.

The team is working on updating the documentation to be more clear about what all happens during HTTPS requests that's different than a standard Express app.