Question

Update

The accepted answer was good for last year but today I would use the package everyone else uses:
https://github.com/mikeal/request

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Original

I’m trying to grab google’s logo and save it to my server with node.js.

This is what I have right now and doesn’t work:

        var options = {
            host: 'google.com',
            port: 80,
            path: '/images/logos/ps_logo2.png'
        };

        var request = http.get(options);

        request.on('response', function (res) {
            res.on('data', function (chunk) {
                fs.writeFile(dir+'image.png', chunk, function (err) {
                    if (err) throw err;
                    console.log('It\'s saved!');
                });
            });
        });

How can I get this working?

Answer 1

A few things happening here:

1. I assume you required fs/http, and set the dir variable 🙂
2. google.com redirects to http://www.google.com, so you’re saving the redirect response’s body, not the image
3. the response is streamed. that means the ‘data’ event fires many times, not once. you have to save and join all the chunks together to get the full response body
4. since you’re getting binary data, you have to set the encoding accordingly on response and writeFile (default is utf8)

This should work:

var http = require('http')
  , fs = require('fs')
  , options

options = {
    host: 'www.google.com'
  , port: 80
  , path: '/images/logos/ps_logo2.png'
}

var request = http.get(options, function(res){
    var imagedata = ''
    res.setEncoding('binary')

    res.on('data', function(chunk){
        imagedata += chunk
    })

    res.on('end', function(){
        fs.writeFile('logo.png', imagedata, 'binary', function(err){
            if (err) throw err
            console.log('File saved.')
        })
    })

})