troubleshooting.md

I'm using a key from the Developer's Console, but getting: Your private key is in an unexpected format and cannot be used. Please try again with another private key.

There are many types of keys that can be created through the Developer's Console. The one gcloud expects is one for a "Service account".

See "I'm not using Compute Engine. What do I need to do?" from the FAQ for detailed steps on how to create and obtain a JSON key.

Reference Issue: #261

The app crashes with an error: "The system cannot find the path specified"

Windows users may face this issue when using npm modules such as gcloud-node, see "Node's nested node_modules approach is basically incompatible with Windows". There are 3 solutions you should try:

1. Install npm version 3 or greater, which dedupes by default
2. Manually run npm dedupe from inside your project directory
3. Move your project to the C:\ directory

Reference Issue: #1162

My requests are returning errors instructing me to retry the request.

If you ever see an error like this, you might be pinging the API too rapidly, hitting a rate limit:

ApiError: The service was unable to fulfill your request. Please try again.

Each API call might have its own requirements for what constitutes reaching the rate limit. We solve this across most of the requests we make by using an exponential backoff retry strategy. However, if you make several requests at once, you will inevitably reach that limit.

As an example, if you need to delete multiple Pub/Sub subscriptions at a time, you might do something like:

subscriptions.forEach(function(subscription) {
  subscription.delete();
});

Assuming you had 50 subscriptions, this would make 50 simultaneous requests to the API. That's likely to cause the rate limit to be reached.

Instead, consider using a library like async to throttle your requests:

var async = require('async');
var PARALLEL_LIMIT = 10;

function deleteSubscription(subscription, callback) {
  subscription.delete(callback);
}

async.eachLimit(subscriptions, PARALLEL_LIMIT, deleteSubscription, function(err) {
  if (!err) {
    // Subscriptions deleted.
  }
});

This will only allow 10 at a time to go through, making it easier on the API to keep up with your requests.

Reference Issue: #1101