fs Module
AppSignal for Node.js 3.x can instrument the fs Module
, giving you greater insight into what impact file management has on the performance of your application.
The fs
Module in Node.js provides an API for interacting with the file system allowing your application to read and write files. The fs module has many functions that enable your application to interact with files, such as mkdir
to create new directories and rename
to alter a file's name.
Installation
The fs
Module is only automatically instrumented in the AppSignal for Node.js package, from version 3.0.0 to 3.0.6.
This module is not enabled by default in version 3.0.7 onwards. To enable this instrumentation, follow the instructions for adding additional instrumentation using the @opentelemetry/instrumentation-fs package. Please note that it may not work due to an upstream issue with the OpenTelemetry instrumentation package for the fs
module.
Follow the setup instructions below to view fs
events in your application's event timelines.
Usage
To use fs module functions such as readFileSync
in your application, add const fs = require('fs')
to the top of your app.js
file:
import fs from "fs"; import express from "express"; // or: const fs = require("fs"); // or: const express = require("express"); const app = express(); app.get("/", (req, res) => { const greetings = fs.readFileSync("greetings.txt"); res.send(greetings); });
Once configured, your application's event timelines will report the performance of fs module functions:

fs
Module Functions
The functions listed below are supported both in the sync and async variants (i.e. exists and existsSync) and the promise versions from the fs/promises module.
Function | Promise | Callback | Sync |
---|---|---|---|
access | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
appendFile | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
chmod | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
chown | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
copyFile | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
cp | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
lchown | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
link | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
lstat | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
lutimes | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
mkdir | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
mkdtemp | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
open | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
opendir | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
readdir | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
readFile | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
readlink | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
realpath | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
rename | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
rm | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
rmdir | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
stat | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
symlink | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
truncate | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
unlink | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
utimes | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
writeFile | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
lchmod | ✓ | ⨯ | ⨯ |
exists | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |