How do you remove a file from the filesystem using Node.js?

Node offers a synchronous method, and an asynchronous method through the fs built-in module.

The asynchronous one is fs.unlink().

The synchronous one is fs.unlinkSync().

The difference is simple: the synchronous call will cause your code to block and wait until the file has been removed. The asynchronous one will not block your code, and will call a callback function once the file has been deleted.

Here’s how to use those 2 functions:

fs.unlinkSync():

const fs = require('fs')

const path = './file.txt'

try {
  fs.unlinkSync(path)
  //file removed
} catch(err) {
  console.error(err)
}

fs.unlink():

const fs = require('fs')

const path = './file.txt'

fs.unlink(path, (err) => {
  if (err) {
    console.error(err)
    return
  }

  //file removed
})

Lessons in this unit:

0:	Introduction
1:	How to check if a file exists in Node.js
2:	How to create an empty file in Node.js
3:	How to get the names of all the files in a folder in Node
4:	How to get the last updated date of a file using Node.js
5:	▶︎ How to remove a file with Node.js
6:	How to write a JSON object to file in Node.js
7:	How to empty a folder in Node.js
8:	Working with file descriptors in Node
9:	Node File Paths
10:	Node file stats
11:	Working with folders in Node
12:	How to use the Node.js fs module with async/await
13:	How to get the current folder in Node
14:	How to get the file extension in Node.js from the MIME type
15:	How to get the file extension in Node.js
16:	How to list files in a folder in Node
17:	How to mass rename files in Node.js
18:	Node.js get all files in a folder recursively
19:	Incrementing multiple folders numbers at once using Node.js
20:	Save some text to a file in Node.js