How to Sleep and Wait in JavaScript

You can pause the execution of a JavaScript function for a specified amount of time by taking advantage of the timeouts feature of the JavaScript engine and promises.

Timeouts allow you to run code after a certain amount of time has passed.

We can make the timeout resolve a promise after a specified amount of time has passed, thereby allowing us to continue the execution of the code after the timeout has passed.

First, let's create a promise that resolves after a timeout is passed.

JAVASCRIPT
const sleep = (duration) => {
    return new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, duration));
}

From here, you can then call this function and pass the then method a callback function that will be executed after the specified amount of time.

JAVASCRIPT
sleep(1000).then(() => {
    console.log("I waited 1 second");
})

If you don't want to use then(), you can use the more modern await syntax.

JAVASCRIPT
const sleep = (duration) => {
    return new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, duration));
}

const main = async () => {
    await sleep(1000)
    console.log("I waited 1 second");
}

You can even define sleep in a single line of code:

JAVASCRIPT
const sleep = (duration) => new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(resolve, duration));

Now that's some beautiful code!

Conclusion

In this post, we've covered how you can combine timeouts and promises to support sleeping for a specified amount of time.

You can use this in your code to make JavaScript wait for a certain amount of time before continuing.

Hopefully, you've found this post useful and have enjoyed reading it.

Happy coding!

• Support Us
• Discord
• Share
• Post
• Share