best way to get folder and file list in Javascript

fs/promises and fs.Dirent

Here's an efficient, non-blocking ls program using Node's fast fs.Dirent objects and fs/promises module. This approach allows you to skip wasteful fs.exist or fs.stat calls on every path -

// main.js
import { readdir } from "fs/promises"
import { join } from "path"

async function* ls (path = ".")
{ yield path
  for (const dirent of await readdir(path, { withFileTypes: true }))
    if (dirent.isDirectory())
      yield* ls(join(path, dirent.name))
    else
      yield join(path, dirent.name)
}

async function* empty () {}

async function toArray (iter = empty())
{ let r = []
  for await (const x of iter)
    r.push(x)
  return r
}

toArray(ls(".")).then(console.log, console.error)

Let's get some sample files so we can see ls working -

$ yarn add immutable     # (just some example package)
$ node main.js

[
  '.',
  'main.js',
  'node_modules',
  'node_modules/.yarn-integrity',
  'node_modules/immutable',
  'node_modules/immutable/LICENSE',
  'node_modules/immutable/README.md',
  'node_modules/immutable/contrib',
  'node_modules/immutable/contrib/cursor',
  'node_modules/immutable/contrib/cursor/README.md',
  'node_modules/immutable/contrib/cursor/__tests__',
  'node_modules/immutable/contrib/cursor/__tests__/Cursor.ts.skip',
  'node_modules/immutable/contrib/cursor/index.d.ts',
  'node_modules/immutable/contrib/cursor/index.js',
  'node_modules/immutable/dist',
  'node_modules/immutable/dist/immutable-nonambient.d.ts',
  'node_modules/immutable/dist/immutable.d.ts',
  'node_modules/immutable/dist/immutable.es.js',
  'node_modules/immutable/dist/immutable.js',
  'node_modules/immutable/dist/immutable.js.flow',
  'node_modules/immutable/dist/immutable.min.js',
  'node_modules/immutable/package.json',
  'package.json',
  'yarn.lock'
]

For added explanation and other ways to leverage async generators, see this Q&A.

In my project I use this function for getting huge amount of files. It's pretty fast (put require("fs") out to make it even faster):

var _getAllFilesFromFolder = function(dir) {

    var filesystem = require("fs");
    var results = [];

    filesystem.readdirSync(dir).forEach(function(file) {

        file = dir+'/'+file;
        var stat = filesystem.statSync(file);

        if (stat && stat.isDirectory()) {
            results = results.concat(_getAllFilesFromFolder(file))
        } else results.push(file);

    });

    return results;

};

usage is clear:

_getAllFilesFromFolder(__dirname + "folder");