Configure vision client with API key?

Environment details

• OS: Mac OS
• Node.js version: 8.11.1
• npm version: 5.6.0
• @google-cloud/vision version: 0.19.0

Steps to reproduce

None, this is a question.

Question

Is it possible to configure the vision client with an API key rather than a Credentials object?

Our use case does not allow us checking in a credentials.json file into the repository, but we are able to use environment variables. It would be nice to be able to use the vision lib rather than POSTing directly to the images:annotate endpoint.

I’ve tried stringifying the Credentials object, then parsing and passing it into the constructor, but then I get strange errors like Auth error:Error: invalid_grant: Invalid JWT Signature. Plus that just seems like more hoops to jump through than necessary, considering the Vision API supports API keys.

// Throws like 10 invalid_grant errors

const visionClient = new vision.ImageAnnotatorClient({
    credentials: JSON.parse(GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS),
});

visionClient.cropHints(buffer)
    .then(results => console.log(results));

[alexander-fenster]

@chougron Oh, this issue seems to be forgotten here, sorry for that! Using an API key from the Node.js application is a little bit tricky but totally possible. This gist shows the complete example, here is the main part of it:

const apiKey = 'REDACTED'; // <-- use your API key here
const vision = require('@google-cloud/vision');
const {GoogleAuth, grpc} = require('google-gax');

function getApiKeyCredentials() {
  const sslCreds = grpc.credentials.createSsl();
  const googleAuth = new GoogleAuth();
  const authClient = googleAuth.fromAPIKey(apiKey);
  const credentials = grpc.credentials.combineChannelCredentials(
    sslCreds,
    grpc.credentials.createFromGoogleCredential(authClient)
  );
  return credentials;
}
...
// initialize the client
const sslCreds = getApiKeyCredentials();
const client = new vision.ImageAnnotatorClient({sslCreds});

Anyway, please be advised that we recommend using service account key for authentication on the server side, and OAuth2 for the client side authentication. Please consider using either of those instead of API key authentication.

Let me know if it helps!

[asraful]

@alexander-fenster your solution works without any issue .