What Is a Node.js Stream?

Streams are a built-in Node.js language feature that represent an asynchronous flow of data, and are a way to handle reading/writing files. They’re meant to be like Unix pipes, allowing us to hook up a data source one end, any number of consumers on the other end, and pass data between them. Node streams can help you process a file that’s larger than your free memory space because, instead of a program reading a file into memory all at once, it processes data into smaller chunks.

By the end of this tutorial, you should be able to:

• Learn what is a Node.js stream
• Understand the limitations of reading an entire file into memory
• Know what are the benefits of, and use cases for, Node streams
• Understand some of the events streams emit
• Learn what pipe does in Node, and how to connect streams using pipe
• Use the fs module to create Node streams from files
• Know how to handle stream errors in Node