How to show progress while downloading data in node.js

What if you are downloading a large file and need to show the users the progress of the download. You can do that by downloading the data in chunks. This is called streaming. Unfortunately, fetch doesn't have any support for streaming.

We need to use the node http module. Here's an example.

const Http = require('http');
const Fs   = require('fs');
const url = 'url'; // some large file
const path = 'save_path';

let downloaded = 0;
let percents = 0;
let size = 0;

const request = Http.request(url, (response) => {
  size = parseInt(response.headers['content-length']);

  response.on('data', (chunk) => {
    downloaded += chunk.length;
    percents = parseInt((downloaded / size) * 100);

    console.log(percents +'%', downloaded +'/'+size);
  });

  response.on('error', (error) => {
    console.log(error);
  });

  response.pipe(Fs.createWriteStream(path));

  setTimeout(() => {
    response.pause(); console.log('stream paused');

    setTimeout(() => {
      response.resume(); console.log('stream resumed');
    }, 5000);
  }, 5000);
}).end();