The idea behind this post presented itself to me when I realized nobody had the full A to Z example of saving an image via some binary data.

In my case, I wanted to save an image from an API. Most examples in Node.js I found on the web were turning around and directly creating an <img> element and setting the src with base64 string or something like that. In my case, I wanted to save the API response directly as an image file. The process is:

• call arrayBuffer() on the fetch response object.
• convert the ArrayBuffer object to a Buffer object with Buffer.from()
• save the file via fs.createWriteStream() and write() the Buffer object

I also used the nice file-type package to attempt to determine the file type of the image, since the API doesn't tell you 🤷‍♂️  [^1].

So, here's the full code example:

import fs from "fs";
import fetch from "node-fetch";
import FileType from "file-type";

const API_URL_HERE = "your-api-url.whatever";

async function savePhotoFromAPI() {
    const response = await fetch(API_URL_HERE);
    const arrayBuffer = await response.arrayBuffer();
    const buffer = Buffer.from(arrayBuffer);
    const fileType = await FileType.fromBuffer(buffer);
    if (fileType.ext) {
        const outputFileName = `yourfilenamehere.${fileType.ext}`
        fs.createWriteStream(outputFileName).write(buffer);
    } else {
        console.log('File type could not be reliably determined! The binary data may be malformed! No file saved!')
    }
}

savePhotoFromAPI();

Footnotes

[^1]: Further more, even in 2020, there is no accepted standard for many file types. Wikipedia states: Since there is no standard list of extensions, more than one format can use the same extension, which can confuse both the operating system and users. Yep, a real pain.