Handling Image Uploads in Node with Multer and Cloudinary

Hey there! 👋 I recently ran into a bit of a challenge while creating my portfolio. I had a blog page with cover images, and initially, I used Multer to upload images to a local folder on my server. Everything worked like a charm until I decided to host my site on Render directly from GitHub. The images weren't uploading to GitHub, which wasn't surprising.

I decided to use cloud-based storage and opted for Cloudinary. In this guide, I'll walk you through how I set up Cloudinary on my server integrated it with Multer, and saved the image links to MongoDB.Solving my problem.

I started by installing the dependencies.

npm install multer cloudinary dotenv

Before diving into code, I had to set up Cloudinary account and grab my API key, API secret, and cloud name from the dashboard. I added a .env file in my server's root folder and populated it like this:

CLOUDINARY_API_KEY=your_api_key
CLOUDINARY_API_SECRET=your_api_secret
CLOUDINARY_CLOUD_NAME=your_cloud_name

Next, I created a utils folder and within it, a file named cloudinary.js to configure my Cloudinary setup:

// utils/cloudinary.js

const cloudinary = require('cloudinary').v2;
require('dotenv').config();

cloudinary.config({
  cloud_name: process.env.CLOUDINARY_CLOUD_NAME,
  api_key: process.env.CLOUDINARY_API_KEY,
  api_secret: process.env.CLOUDINARY_API_SECRET,
});

module.exports = cloudinary;

Now, in my root folder, I set up a middleware folder, and within it I Created a file named multer.js to configure Multer:

// multer.js

const multer = require('multer');

const storage = multer.memoryStorage();
const upload = multer({ storage: storage });

module.exports = upload;

imported these two files into my post controllers like this:

// Your post controllers file

const cloudinary = require('./utils/cloudinary');
const upload = require('./multer');

Now, in my post route, I can upload a file and wait until it's uploaded using a promise before adding the rest of the form data from the body. Here's how my post route looks: