Recursively create directories with Node.js
Recently, while working on a new project, I needed to create a series of nested
directories. From the command-line, it's easy enough, just pass -p to mkdir
and it will create all of the parent directories automatically.
With modern versions of Node.js, specifically 10 and above, you can achieve the
same functionality with fs:
Synchronously
fs.mkdirSync('./path/to/my/directory', { recursive: true })Asynchronously
await fs.promises.mkdir('./path/to/my/directory', { recursive: true })Assuming you're on an older version of Node.js and are reluctant to upgrade to 10+, you'll have to do things a bit more manually.
The gist is, you'll need to break the path apart and loop through each part of it, creating the non-existent parent directories along the way. That looks something like this:
const path = './path/to/my/directory';
path.split('/').reduce(
(directories, directory) => {
directories += </span><span class="token interpolation"><span class="token interpolation-punctuation punctuation">${</span>directory<span class="token interpolation-punctuation punctuation">}</span></span><span class="token string">/</span><span class="token template-punctuation string">;
if (!fs.existsSync(directories)) {
fs.mkdirSync(directories);
}
return directories;
},
'',
);
With 10.x currently in maintenance mode and at end of life very soon, I'd highly recommend upgrading Node.js before doing the aforementioned.