I have a JS async function in Node. Say, it downloads a file from a URL and does something with it, eg. unzip it. I wrote it like this, it works, but eslint showed me there is a thick code smell: error Promise executor functions should not be async no-async-promise-executor. Async was required because of await fetch in body function.
I am not skilled enough with streams nor async/await to correct it by myself. I would like to get rid of the Promise and fully use async/await. The module stream/promises seems the way to go from Node-15 on as commented here how-to-use-es8-async-await-with-streams. How to use await pipeline(...) in this context? Maybe there's a better and shorter way?
Here's the function:
function doSomething(url) {
return new Promise(async (resolve, reject) => {
try {
const fileWriteStream = fs.createWriteStream(someFile, {
autoClose: true,
flags: 'w',
});
const res = await fetch(url);
const body = res.body;
body
.pipe(fileWriteStream)
.on('error', (err) => {
reject(err);
})
.on('finish', async () => {
await doWhatever();
resolve('DONE');
});
} catch (err) {
reject(err);
}
});
}
You could simply perform the await before getting to the executor:
async function doSomething(url) {
const fileWriteStream = fs.createWriteStream(someFile, { autoClose: true, flags: 'w' });
let { body } = await fetch(url);
body.pipe(fileWriteStream);
return new Promise((reject, resolve) => {
body.on('error', reject);
body.on('finish', resolve);
});
};
My advice in general is to remove as much code from within your promise executors as possible. In this case the Promise is only necessary to capture resolution/rejection.
Note that I've also removed doWhatever from within doSomething - this makes doSomething much more robust. You can simply do:
doSomething('http://example.com').then(doWhatever);
Lastly I recommend you set someFile as a parameter of doSomething instead of referencing it from some broader context!
To use the pipeline function you're looking for, it would be
const { pipeline } = require('stream/promises');
async function doSomething(url) {
const fileWriteStream = fs.createWriteStream(someFile, {
autoClose: true,
flags: 'w',
});
const res = await fetch(url);
await pipeline(res.body, fileWriteStream);
await doWhatever();
return 'DONE';
}
You can use the fs/promises in NodeJS and trim your code down to the following:
import { writeFile } from 'fs/promises'
async function doSomething(url) {
const res = await fetch(url);
if (!res.ok) throw new Error('Response not ok');
await writeFile(someFile, res.body, { encoding: 'utf-8'})
await doWhatever();
return 'DONE';
});
}