writeFile no such file or directory - node.js

Question

I have a file(data.file an image), I would like to save this image. Now an image with the same name could exist before it. I would like to overwrite if so or create it if it does not exist since before. I read that the flag "w" should do this.
Code:
fs.writeFile('/avatar/myFile.png', data.file, {
flag: "w"
}, function(err) {
if (err) {
return console.log(err);
}
console.log("The file was saved!");
});
Error:
[Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/avatar/myFile.png']
errno: -2,
code: 'ENOENT',
syscall: 'open',
path: '/avatar/myFile.png'

Answer 1

This is probably because you are trying to write to root of file system instead of your app directory '/avatar/myFile.png' -> __dirname + '/avatar/myFile.png' should do the trick, also check if folder exists. node.js won't create parent folder for you.

Answer 2

Many of us are getting this error because parent path does not exist. E.g. you have /tmp directory available but there is no folder "foo" and you are writing to /tmp/foo/bar.txt.
To solve this, you can use mkdirp - adapted from How to write file if parent folder doesn't exist?
Option A) Using Callbacks
const mkdirp = require('mkdirp');
const fs = require('fs');
const getDirName = require('path').dirname;
function writeFile(path, contents, cb) {
mkdirp(getDirName(path), function (err) {
if (err) return cb(err);
fs.writeFile(path, contents, cb);
});
}
Option B) Using Async/Await
Or if you have an environment where you can use async/await:
const mkdirp = require('mkdirp');
const fs = require('fs');
const writeFile = async (path, content) => {
await mkdirp(path);
fs.writeFileSync(path, content);
}

Answer 3

I solved a similar problem where I was trying to create a file with a name that contained characters that are not allowed. Watch out for that as well because it gives the same error message.

Answer 4

I ran into this error when creating some nested folders asynchronously right before creating the files. The destination folders wouldn't always be created before promises to write the files started. I solved this by using mkdirSync instead of 'mkdir' in order to create the folders synchronously.
try {
fs.mkdirSync(DestinationFolder, { recursive: true } );
} catch (e) {
console.log('Cannot create folder ', e);
}
fs.writeFile(path.join(DestinationFolder, fileName), 'File Content Here', (err) => {
if (err) throw err;
});

Answer 5

Actually, the error message for the file names that are not allowed in Linux/ Unix system comes up with the same error which is extremely confusing. Please check the file name if it has any of the reserved characters. These are the reserved /, >, <, |, :, & characters for Linux / Unix system. For a good read follow this link.

Answer 6

It tells you that the avatar folder does not exist.
Before writing a file into this folder, you need to check that a directory called "avatar" exists and if it doesn't, create it:
if (!fs.existsSync('/avatar')) {
fs.mkdirSync('/avatar', { recursive: true});
}

Answer 7

you can use './' as a prefix for your path.
in your example, you will write:
fs.writeFile('./avatar/myFile.png', data.file, (err) => {
if (err) {
return console.log(err);
}
console.log("The file was saved!");
});

Answer 8

I had this error because I tried to run:
fs.writeFile(file)
fs.unlink(file)
...lots of code... probably not async issue...
fs.writeFile(file)
in the same script. The exception occurred on the second writeFile call. Removing the first two calls solved the problem.

Answer 9

In my case, I use async fs.mkdir() and then, without waiting for this task to complete, I tried to create a file fs.writeFile()...

Answer 10

As SergeS mentioned, using / attempts to write in your system root folder, but instead of using __dirname, which points to the path of the file where writeFile is invoked, you can use process.cwd() to point to the project's directory. Example:
writeFile(`${process.cwd()}/pictures/myFile.png`, data, (err) => {...});
If you want to avoid string concatenations/interpolations, you may also use path.join(process.cwd(), 'pictures', 'myFile.png') (more details, including directory creation, in this digitalocean article).