Could not load the default credentials? (Node.js Google Compute Engine tutorial)

Question

SITUATION:

I follow this tutorial: https://cloud.google.com/nodejs/tutorials/bookshelf-on-compute-engine

Everything works fine until I do

Answer 1

I provide another way which is set the credentials manually. For local development and running on GCP, like Cloud Function, Compute Engine.

You can use a service account and grant this service account proper permission. e.g. Cloud Trace Admin

Set private_key, client_email and projectId options for any GCP client library. These options you can get from the service account json file.

For example, I am using Cloud Trace Node.js client library in my cloud functions.

Before I set the credentials and projectId, I got this 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. at GoogleAuth. (/srv/node_modules/google-auth-library/build/src/auth/googleauth.js:248:31) at step (/srv/node_modules/google-auth-library/build/src/auth/googleauth.js:47:23) at Object.next (/srv/node_modules/google-auth-library/build/src/auth/googleauth.js:28:53) at fulfilled (/srv/node_modules/google-auth-library/build/src/auth/googleauth.js:19:58) at at process._tickDomainCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:229:7)

You can pass the credentials and projectId as environment variables. After setting credentials and projectId, the error is gone.

const tracer = require('@google-cloud/trace-agent').start({
    samplingRate: 0,
    bufferSize: 1,
    credentials: {
      client_email: process.env.CLIENT_EMAIL,
      private_key: process.env.TRACE_AGENT_ADMIN,
    },
    projectId: process.env.X_GOOGLE_GCLOUD_PROJECT || process.env.PROJECT_ID,
  });

X_GOOGLE_GCLOUD_PROJECT is a built-in environment variable for cloud function runtime