How to List all Files in a Directory using Node

As a back-end runtime, you can use Node to perform file system operations on the server that it is running on.

One of the most common operations is listing all of the files from a directory.

In this post, we'll learn how to use Node to list all of the files in a directory with a given path.

How to list all of the files in a directory

To read files from the directory, we'll be using the fs module, the module used for file system operations.

In this module is the method readdir that we can use to list all of the files in a directory.

Simply pass it the path of the directory you want to list the files from, and it will return an array of all of the files in that directory.

Let's say this is the path to the directory that you want to check:

JAVASCRIPT
const path = "/path/to/directory";

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

const path = "/path/to/directory";
const files = await fs.readdir(path);

files.forEach(file => console.log(file));

Keep in mind that this operation will be done asynchronously, which is why we use the await keyword.

If you need to do this synchronously, you can use the fs module directly with the readdirSync method.

JAVASCRIPT
import fs from 'fs';

const path = "/path/to/directory";
const files = fs.readdirSync(path);

files.forEach(file => console.log(file));

Either way, you'll get an array of all of the files in the directory, including their file extensions.

Conclusion

In this post, we learned how to use Node to list all of the files in a directory using a path you provide.

You can either do this asynchronously or synchronously using the fs module.

Thanks for reading this post!

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