How to download an image with node-fetch

node-fetch is a great package that allows you to use the wonderful fetch API in server-side Node.js. It can also be used to request and download images from a URL to the local filesystem!

Here’s how you do it, assuming that you have node-fetch already installed ( by running npm install node-fetch).

const fs = require("fs"); // Built-in filesystem package for Node.js
const fetch = require("node-fetch");

const imageUrl = "https://via.placeholder.com/350x150";

fetch(imageUrl).then((res) =>
  res.body.pipe(fs.createWriteStream("./path/to/image.png"))
);

This downloads the image at imageUrl and “pipes” (downloads) it to the given path.

Note: Make sure that the folder you’re downloading into exists already. If it doesn’t, you’ll want to create the folders required by doing something like:

const fs = require("fs");

fs.mkdirSync("./path/to", { recursive: true });