Question

I’ve been tinkering with Node.js and found a little problem. I’ve got a script which resides in a directory called data. I want the script to write some data to a file in a subdirectory within the data subdirectory. However I am getting the following error:

{ [Error: ENOENT, open 'D:\data\tmp\test.txt'] errno: 34, code: 'ENOENT', path: 'D:\\data\\tmp\\test.txt' }

The code is as follows:

var fs = require('fs');
fs.writeFile("tmp/test.txt", "Hey there!", function(err) {
    if(err) {
        console.log(err);
    } else {
        console.log("The file was saved!");
    }
}); 

Can anybody help me in finding out how to make Node.js create the directory structure if it does not exits for writing to a file?

Answer 1

Node > 10.12.0

fs.mkdir now accepts a { recursive: true } option like so:

// Creates /tmp/a/apple, regardless of whether `/tmp` and /tmp/a exist.
fs.mkdir('/tmp/a/apple', { recursive: true }, (err) => {
  if (err) throw err;
});

or with a promise:

fs.promises.mkdir('/tmp/a/apple', { recursive: true }).catch(console.error);

Notes,

1. In many case you would use fs.mkdirSync rather than fs.mkdir

2. It is harmless / has no effect to include a trailing slash.

3. mkdirSync/mkdir no nothing harmlessly if the directory already exists, there’s no need to check for existence.

Node <= 10.11.0

You can solve this with a package like mkdirp or fs-extra. If you don’t want to install a package, please see Tiago Peres França’s answer below.