Node FileSystem Utils

Installation

npm install node-filesystem-utils

Why?

When using the native Node filesystem API you interact with a single file at any given time, which I find limiting. This module supports Java-style method overloading making it possible to pass a wider array of arguments.

For this module you can pass a single file or an Array of files making it possible to read or write one or many files with just one method call.

Features:

• Read / write one or multiple files with a single method call
• Automatically create non existing folders when saving files
• Append data to existing JSON files
• Get a list of all files in a directory (non recursive)
• Count the number of files in a directory (non recursive)
• Get File Objects from a file containing the file's mimetype, name, dir, path and extension

Examples

Save multiple files

var fileUtils = require('node-filesystem-utils');
 
var manifest = [
    {
        path: '/Users/christianrich/test',
        filename: 'file1.txt',
        data: 'this is same text for the 1st file'
    },
 
    {
        path: '/Users/christianrich/test',
        filename: 'file1.txt',
        data: 'this is same text for the 2nd file'
    },
 
    {
        path: '/Users/christianrich/test',
        filename: 'file3.txt',
        data: 'this is same text for the 3rd file'
    }
];
 
fileUtil.writeFiles(manifest, function(err, files){
    if(err) throw err;
    console.log(files);
});

Read multiple files

var fileUtils = require('node-filesystem-utils');
 
var manifest = [
    '/User/christianrich/test/1/myFile1.txt',
    '/User/christianrich/test/1/myFile2.txt',
    '/User/christianrich/test/1/myFile3.txt'
];
 
fileUtil.readFiles(manifest, 'utf8', function(err, files){
    if(err) throw err;
    console.log(files);
}

The returned files array has the same order as the manifest.

Get the directory part of a path

var fileUtils = require('node-filesystem-utils');
 
fileUtils.getDirectory('/Users/christianrich/test/someFile.txt'); // /Users/christianrich/test/
fileUtils.getDirectory('/Users/christianrich/test/'); // /Users/christianrich/test/

Is a path a directory or a file?

var fileUtils = require('node-filesystem-utils');
 
fileUtils.isDirectory('/Users/christianrich/'); // true
fileUtils.isDirectory('/Users/christianrich/test/someFile.txt'); // false

Copy a file or directory not caring if the destination path exists

var fileUtils = require('node-filesystem-utils');
 
fileUtils.copy('/Users/christianrich/folder1/', '/Users/christianrich/may-or-may-not-exist/', function(err, dest){
    if(err) throw err;
});

Get a file descriptor object

var fileUtils = require('node-filesystem-utils');
var fo = fileUtils.getFileObject('/Users/christianrich/myFile.txt');

Yields:

{
    mimetype: 'text/plain',
    name: 'myFile.txt',
    path: '/Users/boom/myFile.txt',
    dir: '/Users/boom/',
    extension: 'txt'
}

Append JSON to existing files

Assume we have the file 'example.json' saved on disc:

{
    "myData": []
}

Let's manipulate the file and append an element to the 'myData' array. First create a modifer function. This makes it possible to interact with the JSON structure in any which way you like hence decoupling the data modification from the file IO operation:

var modifier = function(jsonObj, appendData, cb){
    jsonObj.data.push(appendData);
    cb(json);
};

Load the file passing in the modifier:

fileUtil.appendJson('/Users/christianrich/example.json', 'hello', modifier, function(err, file){
    if(err) throw err;
});

Now the file on disc looks like this:

{
    "myData": ['hello']
}

Test

mocha ./test

Limitations

Only tested on Mac and Linux file systems. Will probably not work on Windows OS.

File and folder permissions

When accessing files and folders the logged in user must have permissions to access these. E.g on Amazon AWS EC2 Linux instances, if the default ec2-user tries to access folders above the /home directory you'll get EACCESS errors.

My blog

http://chrisrich.io

License

MIT