How to Delete a File in Node

Node is a runtime that allows you run JavaScript on the backend, or servers.

Because servers will have their own file systems, you can use Node to manipulate files on the server.

One of these manipulations is deleting files.

In this post, we'll learn how to delete files using Node.

How to delete files using Node

The recommended way to delete a file in Node is to use the fs.unlink method.

This method takes a path to a file as a parameter, and will attempt to delete the file.

JAVASCRIPT
import fs from "node:fs";

fs.unlink("example.txt", error => {
    if (error) {
        throw error;
    }

    console.log("File deleted successfully.");
});

Pass it a callback function to handle errors or perform additional actions after the file has been deleted.

BASH
File deleted successfully.

If you wish to do this using the await/async pattern, then you can import promises from fs:

JAVASCRIPT
import { promises as fs } from "fs";

const deleteFile = async path => {
    await fs.unlink(path);
};

const path = "example.txt";
deleteFile(path);

Either way, this will result in the file being deleted successfully from your file system, assuming you have the proper permissions.

Conclusion

In this post, we learned how to delete files using Node.

You can either use the fs.unlink method via callbacks or the await/async pattern to delete files.

Thanks for reading and happy coding!

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