Deferred-fs NPM

deferred-fs

Provides a promise-based API for Node.js's filesystem API.

Requirements

Node.js

Installation

The easiest way is to install deferred-fs using npm, like this:

$ npm install deferred-fs

This will install deferred-fs into your project's node_modules subdirectory. From a Node app, you can then load dfs by doing require('deferred-fs').

Deferred-fs API

The object returned by require('deferred-fs') works exactly like Node's fs library, except that its asynchronous methods return a promise object instead of accepting a callback argument.

Here's an example showing how to use writeFile to asynchronously write a file and print a completion message when done:

var dfs = require('dfs');
dfs.writeFile('hello.txt', 'Hello world!', 'utf8').then(
    function () {
        console.log('File was written successfully.');
    });

In cases where a normal callback would return an "error" argument, the returned promise rejects, meaning the second callback is invoked:

var dfs = require('dfs');
dfs.readFile('/file_that_does_not_exist').then(
	null,
    function (error) {
        console.log('Yikes, an error occurred! ' + error);
    });

The above program will output:

Yikes, an error occurred! Error: ENOENT, open 'c:\file_that_does_not_exist'

The real advantage of the promise approach comes from chaining promises together, allowing you to transform values returned by earlier callbacks and implement high-level error handling.

Promise API

The promise object returned by deferred-fs's asynchronous methods has the familiar "then" API:

then(onResolve, onReject)

Internally these promises are implemented using the Deferred library from Eclipse Orion. This means they're 100% compliant with the Promises/A+ specification, version 1.1.

Deferred API

deferred-fs also exports Orion's Deferred library, giving you access to a richer API than simple promises:

var Deferred = require('deferred-fs').Deferred;

var promises = [ new Deferred().resolve('resolved!'), new Deferred().reject('rejected :(') ];
Deferred.all(promises).then(
  function(results) {
    console.log('All promises resolved: ' + results.join(', '));
  }, function(err) {
    console.log('An error occurred: ' + err);
  });

Consult the Deferred JSDoc for details of the available API methods. In addition to Promises/A+ compliance, Orion's Deferred also implements some evolving APIs like progress and cancellation.