How to get the size of a file in Node.js

To get the size of a file in Node.js, you can use the stat() method provided by the built-in fs module. This method works asynchronously and lists the statistics of a file at the given path.

All you need to do is pass in the file path and a callback function to the fs.stat() method. Once the file statistics are populated by Node.js, it will invoke the callback function with two arguments: an error message and the file stats:

const fs = require('fs')

// Read file stats
fs.stat('file.txt', (err, stats) => {
  if (err) {
    console.log(`File doesn't exist.`)
  } else {
    console.log(stats)
  }
})

The stats object returned by the fs.stat() function looks like the following:

Stats {
  dev: 16777221,
  mode: 33279,
  nlink: 1,
  uid: 501,
  gid: 20,
  rdev: 0,
  blksize: 4096,
  ino: 5172976,
  size: 290,
  blocks: 8,
  atimeMs: 1606143471354.2327,
  mtimeMs: 1599218860000,
  ctimeMs: 1606074010041.4927,
  birthtimeMs: 1605423684000,
  atime: 2020-11-23T14:57:51.354Z,
  mtime: 2020-09-04T11:27:40.000Z,
  ctime: 2020-11-22T19:40:10.041Z,
  birthtime: 2020-11-15T07:01:24.000Z
}

To get the size of the file, you can use the size property in the stats object:

const size = stats.size; // 290 bytes

The size of the file is returned in bytes. You can convert it into a human-readable format to display publicly.

The fs module also provides a synchronous variant of stat() called statSync() that blocks the execution of the Node.js event loop until the file statistics are ready:

try {
  const stats = fs.statSync('file.txt')
} catch (err) {
  console.log(err)
}

The fs.stat() method can also be used to check if the path is a file, a directory, or a symbolic link, as shown below:

const fs = require('fs')

// Read file stats
fs.stat('file.txt', (err, stats) => {
  if (err) {
    console.log(`File doesn't exist.`)
    return
  }

  console.log(stats.isFile()) // true
  console.log(stats.isDirectory()) // false
  console.log(stats.isSymbolicLink()) // false
})

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