I am using axios in Node JS to automatically download some video clip files. To do so, I simply pipe the ReadStream from the axios response into a WriteStream. This is my approach :

const writer = fs.createWriteStream(destination); 

axios({
  url : url
  method : 'GET',
  responseType : 'stream'
})
.then((response) => {

  response.data.pipe(writer);
  const size = Number(response.headers['content-length']);
  let progress = 0;

  writer.on('finish', () => {
    console.log("WRITE STREAM FINISH");
    // DO SOMETHING HERE WITH THE DOWNLOADED FILE
  });

  writer.on('error', (error) => {
    console.error(error);
  });

  // READ STREAM
  response.data.on('data', (data) => {
    progress += Buffer.byteLength(data);
    process.stdout.write("\r DOWNLOAD : " + Math.floor((progress / size * 100)) + "%");
  });

  response.data.on('end', () => {
    console.log("READ STREAM END");
  });

  response.data.on('close', () => {
    console.log("READ STREAM CLOSE");
  });

  response.data.on('error', (error) => {
    console.error("READ STREAM ERROR", error);
  });

})
.catch((error) => {
  console.error("AXIOS ERROR", error);
});

Problem

Most of the time it works perfectly, all events are emitted as expected, and the console output would be something like this :

DOWNLOAD : 100%
READ STREAM END
READ STREAM CLOSE
WRITE STREAM FINISH

But on a very random basis, it happens that the ReadStream is closed before it ends, as a result the finish event from the WriteStream is never emitted. On retrying a couple of seconds later, it works again.

DOWNLOAD : 77%
READ STREAM CLOSE

I checked the downloaded file after this happend. Looks like the download did not finish ( file size too low). Surprisingly enough, there are no errors raised .

Questions

• What could cause the ReadStream from axios to close before it ends ?
• Could there be a problem at the requested server / file source ?
• Any suggestions how I could troubleshoot this further ?