Remove directory which is not empty

In my Node application I need to remove a directory which has some files, but fs.rmdir only works on empty directories. How can I do this?

As of 2019...

As of Node.js 12.10.0, fs.rmdirSync supports a recursive options, so you can finally do:

fs.rmdirSync(dir, { recursive: true });

Where the recursive option deletes the entire directory recursively.

Update: The recursive option in fs.rmdir / fs.rmdirSync has been deprecated however, so use fs.rm / fs.rmSync instead:

fs.rmSync(dir, { recursive: true, force: true });

The force: true option ignores exceptions if dir does not exist. More info see the fs.rmSync docs

There is a module for this called rimraf (https://npmjs.org/package/rimraf). It provides the same functionality as rm -Rf

Async usage:

var rimraf = require("rimraf");
rimraf("/some/directory", function () { console.log("done"); });

Sync usage:

rimraf.sync("/some/directory");

To remove folder synchronously

    const fs = require('fs');
    const Path = require('path');

    const deleteFolderRecursive = function (directoryPath) {
    if (fs.existsSync(directoryPath)) {
        fs.readdirSync(directoryPath).forEach((file, index) => {
          const curPath = path.join(directoryPath, file);
          if (fs.lstatSync(curPath).isDirectory()) {
           // recurse
            deleteFolderRecursive(curPath);
          } else {
            // delete file
            fs.unlinkSync(curPath);
          }
        });
        fs.rmdirSync(directoryPath);
      }
    };

Most of the people using fs with Node.js would like functions close to the "Unix way" of dealing with files. I'm using fs-extra to bring all the cool stuff :

fs-extra contains methods that aren't included in the vanilla Node.js fs package. Such as mkdir -p, cp -r, and rm -rf.

Even better, fs-extra is a drop in replacement for native fs. All methods in fs are unmodified and attached to it. It means that you can replace fs by fs-extra :

// this can be replaced
const fs = require('fs')

// by this
const fs = require('fs-extra')

And then you can remove a folder this way:

fs.removeSync('/tmp/myFolder'); 
//or
fs.remove('/tmp/myFolder', callback);

As of Node v14 (October 2020), the fs module has fs.rm and rs.rmSync that support recursive, non-empty directory unlinking:

https://nodejs.org/docs/latest-v14.x/api/fs.html#fs_fs_rm_path_options_callback

So you can now do something like this:

const fs = require('fs');
fs.rm('/path/to/delete', { recursive: true }, () => console.log('done'));

or:

const fs = require('fs');
fs.rmSync('/path/to/delete', { recursive: true });
console.log('done');

Remove directory which is not empty

As of 2019...

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