How to promisify Node's child_process.exec and child_process.execFile functions with Bluebird?

Question

I'm using the Bluebird promise library under Node.js, it's great! But I have a question:

If you take a look at the documentation of Node's child_process.exec and child_process.execFile you can see that both of these functions are returning a ChildProcess object.

So what's the recommended way to promisify such functions?

Note that the following works (I get a Promise object):

var Promise = require('bluebird');
var execAsync = Promise.promisify(require('child_process').exec);
var execFileAsync = Promise.promisify(require('child_process').execFile);

But how can one get access to the original return value of the original Node.js functions? (In these cases I would need to be able to access the originally returned ChildProcess objects.)

Any suggestion would be appreciated!

EDIT:

Here is an example code which is using the return value of the child_process.exec function:

var exec = require('child_process').exec;
var child = exec('node ./commands/server.js');
child.stdout.on('data', function(data) {
    console.log('stdout: ' + data);
});
child.stderr.on('data', function(data) {
    console.log('stderr: ' + data);
});
child.on('close', function(code) {
    console.log('closing code: ' + code);
});

But if I would use the promisified version of the exec function ( execAsync from above ) then the return value will be a promise, not a ChildProcess object. This is the real problem I am talking about.

Answer 1

I would recommend using standard JS promises built into the language over an additional library dependency like Bluebird.

If you're using Node 10+, the Node.js docs recommend using util.promisify which returns a Promise<{ stdout, stderr }> object. See an example below:

const util = require('util');
const exec = util.promisify(require('child_process').exec);

async function lsExample() {
  try {
    const { stdout, stderr } = await exec('ls');
    console.log('stdout:', stdout);
    console.log('stderr:', stderr);
  } catch (e) {
    console.error(e); // should contain code (exit code) and signal (that caused the termination).
  }
}
lsExample()

Handle errors first from stderr.