how to create a readable stream from a remote url in nodejs?

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fs.createReadStream() does not work with http URLs only file:// URLs or filename paths. Unfortunately, this is not described in the fs doc, but if you look at the source code for fs.createReadStream() and follow what it calls you can find that it ends up calling fileURULtoPath(url) which will throw if it’s not a file: URL.

function fileURLToPath(path) {
  if (typeof path === 'string')
    path = new URL(path);
  else if (!isURLInstance(path))
    throw new ERR_INVALID_ARG_TYPE('path', ['string', 'URL'], path);
  if (path.protocol !== 'file:')
    throw new ERR_INVALID_URL_SCHEME('file');
  return isWindows ? getPathFromURLWin32(path) : getPathFromURLPosix(path);
}

It would suggest using the got() library to get yourself a readstream from a URL:

const got = require('got');
const mp4Url="https://www.example.com/path/to/mp4Video.mp4";

app.get('/video', (req, res) => {
    got.stream(mp4Url).pipe(res);
});

More examples described in this article: How to stream file downloads in Nodejs with Got.

You can also use the plain http/https modules to get the readstream, but I find got() to be generally useful at a higher level for lots of http request things so that’s what I use. But, here’s code with the https module.

const https = require('https');
const mp4Url="https://www.example.com/path/to/mp4Video.mp4";

app.get("/", (req, res) => {
    https.get(mp4Url, (stream) => {
        stream.pipe(res);
    });
});

More advanced error handling could be added to both cases.

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