Config file not found using heroku and GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS - heroku

Question

I've created a spring boot application that is deployed on heroku.
Everything works fine.. Now, I am trying to use the Text to Speech api from google cloud. This works fine locally but when I want to use it on heroku i get the warning.
Error reading credential file from environment variable
GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS, value 'config/keyFile.json': File does
not exist.
I've set in heroku the following :
heroku config:set GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=‘config/keyFile.json’
No matter where i put the file.. I cannot get it to work.
Who can help?

Answer 1

I got this to work by setting a heroku config variable (say GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS) with the contents of the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS json file and calling the process.env.GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS where the client needs to be instantiated.
In any case, it is not a best practice to save key files to a remote server (such as heroku), and is safer to call the key using an environment variable.
// Where you need to instantiate the google project client,
var keyValue = JSON.parse(process.env.GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS);
// set the 'credentials' parameter with keyValue

Answer 2

I had a similar issue with vercel where it was unable to find the serviceaccount.json. I finally got it to work by passing the credenitals to directly to the TextToSpeechClient constructor as an object. Just remember to use environment variables for the sensitive properties.
const client = new textToSpeech.TextToSpeechClient({
credentials: {
type: "service_account",
project_id: "",
private_key_id: "",
private_key:"",
client_email: "",
client_id: "",
auth_uri: "",
token_uri: "",
auth_provider_x509_cert_url: "",
client_x509_cert_url:"",
},
});
You can see the Google documentation here: https://cloud.google.com/nodejs/docs/reference/text-to-speech/latest/text-to-speech/v1.texttospeechclient
The documentation is not very clear as to how the ClientOptions object should look like. I just took a guess at the credentials {credentials:{}} part and it worked.
Hope this helps who what to deploy to the cloud and are struggling with getting the right path to the serviceaccount.json