makedir

makedir

Recursively and asyncronously make directories in node.js.

There is another great library called mkdirp that a lot more people use.

I wrote this one independently of that one, and after comparing the code, they do about the same thing.

If you want a widely used, well supported mkdirp, use node-mkdirp. On the other hand, this one works too.

The primary use case I wrote this library for was to make RESTful file system caches of rather expensive-to-create database queries on a web server. Other solutions couldn't handle multiple simultaneous creates that you get from asyncronous operation. For example, if a request asks for foo/bar/baz/batch.txt, and another, simultaneous request asks for foo/bar/bit/bang.txt, then both requests will try to create directories foo/bar. Unless they are careful, one of the processes will erroneously try to create a directory that already exists, and will crash. At the time I wrote this way long time ago, the other libraries I tested would crash.

Installation

To install, do

npm install makedir

Usage

To use, just pass the directory that you want to make. It will climb up the directory tree until it finds something that exist, and then will recursively create all of the directories that are needed. Pass it a callback to do something with that directory once it is created. For example

var makedir = require('makedir');
var p = '/home/james/some/crazy/long/path'
function doSomethingToPath(path){
      return function(err){
          if(err) throw new Error (err);
          console.log('made '+path);
      };
};
makedir.makedir(p,doSomethingToPath(p));

Testing

To run the tests, clone the repository, then:

 npm install
 npm test

or

 mocha test

I just revised my tests to use mocha, and now I actually clean up the mess of temp directories.

If you want to prove to yourself that the tests are creating directories, go into the tests and delete or comment out the "after" bit that clean up the temp directories.

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2012-2014 James E. Marca, using the MIT licence.