Missing dependencies when installing with Node 16

[sizlo]

When trying to use google-auth-library for a react app I am getting lots of errors that indicate missing dependencies. The errors are in the following format:

Module not found: Error: Can't resolve 'buffer' in '/private/tmp/minimal-example/node_modules/buffer-equal-constant-time'

The error messages include details on how to add a polyfill, but after going through each of these and adding the suggested polyfill the library still does not work, outputting the following error to the console:

GET http://metadata.google.internal./computeMetadata/v1/instance net::ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED

Environment details

• OS: macOs 12.0
• Node.js version: 16.13.2
• npm version: 8.1.2
• google-auth-library version: 7.11.0

Steps to reproduce

1. Install Node 16.13.2
2. Create a react app npx create-react-app minimal-example
3. Enter directory for the created project cd minimal-example
4. Install google-auth-library npm install google-auth-library --save
5. Add the following code to ./src/App.js
const {GoogleAuth} = require('google-auth-library');
6. Start the development server npm start
7. Observe errors

[bcoe]

closing in favor of our catch all issue:

googleapis/google-cloud-node#2933

---

We do not at this time support the browser without some manual work on the user's part (discussed in the issue above). We are, however, looking at adding this functionality.

May I ask what APIs you're hoping to interact with from the frontend?

[sizlo]

@bcoe

I have a frontend react app and backend springboot app as separate services in the same Google App Engine instance. I want to be able to identify users based on their google account so have put an Identity-Aware Proxy in front of these services. This currently works fine for the react app, as the browser can present the login page for the user.

The problem I am trying to solve is being able to communicate from the frontend to the backend. When trying to send requests from the react app to the springboot app they fail with the 401 unauthorized status code. I found this stackoverflow thread which suggested this guide on authenticating with a service account as a way to solve this use case.

Is there a more recommended way to solve my use case?