Bruno Pedro

Recursive directory creation with nodejs

2010-12-15

2 min read 

I’m doing some code in nodejs and I found the need to create directories recursively. Basically I need to have the same functionality offered by mkdir -p.

The fs lib doesn’t offer this functionality so I looked around but couldn’t really find anything that suited me. I finally gave up and I’m writing the function myself.

Here’s the code:

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var fs = require('fs');

/**
 * Offers functionality similar to mkdir -p
 *
 * Asynchronous operation. No arguments other than a possible exception
 * are given to the completion callback.
 */
function mkdir_p(path, mode, callback, position) {
    mode = mode || 0777;
    position = position || 0;
    parts = require('path').normalize(path).split('/');

    if (position >= parts.length) {
        if (callback) {
            return callback();
        } else {
            return true;
        }
    }

    var directory = parts.slice(0, position + 1).join('/');
    fs.stat(directory, function(err) {
        if (err === null) {
            mkdir_p(path, mode, callback, position + 1);
        } else {
            fs.mkdir(directory, mode, function (err) {
                if (err) {
                    if (callback) {
                        return callback(err);
                    } else {
                        throw err;
                    }
                } else {
                    mkdir_p(path, mode, callback, position + 1);
                }
            })
        }
    })
}

Update: I just converted this code into an extension to the original fs lib so that it’s easier to use. The extended lib is called node-fs and is available on npm. To install it, simply run npm install node-fs --save.