Node.js - File System get file type, solution around year 2012

Have a look at the mmmagic module. It is a libmagic binding and seems to do exactly what you want.

There is a helper library for looking up mime types https://github.com/broofa/node-mime

var mime = require('mime');

mime.getType('/path/to/file.txt');         // => 'text/plain'

But it still uses the extension for lookup though