Could not do iterative Get in a loop

I did a List to get all the files in a remote path. After which, I tried to loop through each of the file in the List and did a Get. The Get did not happened. I just started the node.js journey. Any advice is greatly appreciated. Apologies that the indentation in the code does not seems to work when I post. Thanks.

Here’s the code:

let Client = require('ssh2-sftp-client');
let client = new Client();
	
const config = {
	host: 'XXXX.XXX.com.sg',
	port: '1022',
	username: 'XXXX',
	password: 'XXXXX',
	retries: 3
}; 

let remotePath = '/OUT/SPH/PROCESSED/';
let localPath = '/tmp/'; 

client.connect(config) 
.then(() => {
	return client.list(remotePath,"ifss*"); 
}) 

.then((listing) => {
	listing.forEach(item => {
		let remoteFile = remotePath + item.name;
		let localFile = localPath + item.name;
		console.log(remoteFile + " , " + localFile);
		client.get(remoteFile, localFile)
		.then((file) => {
			 console.log(file + " download successful.");
		})
		.catch((err) => {
			console.log(err);
		});
	});
	return true;
}) 

.then(() => {
	console.log("File downloaded");
	return client.end();
})
.catch(err => {
	console.error(err.message);		
	return(err.message);
})

Here’s the output:

ngky@instance-1:$ node ssh2-sftp-client-get4.js
/OUT/SPH/PROCESSED/ifss_0309.txt03-09-2019-12:45 , /tmp/ifss_0309.txt03-09-2019-12:45
/OUT/SPH/PROCESSED/ifss_1109.txt11-09-2019-11:30 , /tmp/ifss_1109.txt11-09-2019-11:30
/OUT/SPH/PROCESSED/ifss_1209.txt12-09-2019-11:30 , /tmp/ifss_1209.txt12-09-2019-11:30
/OUT/SPH/PROCESSED/ifss_1309.txt13-09-2019-11:30 , /tmp/ifss_1309.txt13-09-2019-11:30
/OUT/SPH/PROCESSED/ifss_1409.txt14-09-2019-11:30 , /tmp/ifss_1409.txt14-09-2019-11:30
/OUT/SPH/PROCESSED/ifss_1509.txt15-09-2019-11:30 , /tmp/ifss_1509.txt15-09-2019-11:30
/OUT/SPH/PROCESSED/ifss_2308.txt23-08-2019-17:43 , /tmp/ifss_2308.txt23-08-2019-17:43
/OUT/SPH/PROCESSED/ifss_2308.txt25-08-2019-16:15 , /tmp/ifss_2308.txt25-08-2019-16:15
File downloaded

ngky@instance-1:$ ls -l /tmp
total 8
drwx------ 2 ngky ngky 4096 Sep 17 00:10 ssh-dNrB92wH00
drwx------ 2 ngky ngky 4096 Sep 17 00:10 ssh-Xw61UHqyHz

[theophilusx]

Your not quite got your understanding of promises down yet. You might find this link useful - You Don’t Know JS. Kyle’s books are good and his book on async and promises will help a lot. You need to understand the asynchronous nature of promises.

While you can do what yiour trying to do with basic Promises, it gets a bit tredious. You ahve to structure your code so that it is a long Promise.then.then.then… chain. A better approach is to use async, which is a way to use promises, but in a more synchronous manner that avoids the nested .then chain. For example (untested) -

"use strict";

const Client = require('ssh2-sftp-client');

const client = new Client();

const config = {
  host: 'XXXX.XXX.com.sg',
  port: '1022',
  username: 'XXXX',
  password: 'XXXXX',
  retries: 3
};

async function downloadAll(remotePath, localPath) {
  await client.connect(config);
  let listings = await client.list(remotePath, "ifss*");
  listings.forEach(async item => {
    let remoteFile = remotePath + item.name;
    let localFile = localPath + item.name;
    console.log(`Remote: ${remoteFile} Local: ${localFile}`);
    let res = await client.get(remoteFile, localFile);
    console.log(`${res} downloaded`);
  });
  await client.end();
}

downloadAll('/OUT/SPH/PROCESSED/', '/tmp/')
  .then(() => {
    console.log("all files downloaded");
  })
  .catch(err => {
    console.log(`An error occured: ${err.message}`);
  });

As your learning, make sure you use a good editor like Visual Studio Code which will provide lots of help, especially if you add extensions like eslint and prettier etc.

P.S. To format your code in future posts, use the github markup.

[ngky]

Is working based on 1st example! Thanks Tim.

"use strict";

const Client = require("ssh2-sftp-client");

const client = new Client();

const config = {
  host: 'demo.wftpserver.com',
  port: '2222',
  username: 'demo-user',
  password: 'demo-user',
  retries: 3
};

async function downloadAll(remotePath, localPath) {
  await client.connect(config);
  let listings = await client.list(remotePath, "wftpserver*");
  
  for (let item of listings) {
    let remoteFile = remotePath + item.name;
    let localFile = localPath + item.name;
    console.log(`Remote: ${remoteFile} Local: ${localFile}`);
    let res = await client.get(remoteFile, localFile);
    console.log(`${res} downloaded`);
  }
  await client.end();
}

downloadAll("/download/", "/tmp/")
  .then(() => {
    console.log("all files downloaded");
  })
  .catch(err => {
    console.log(`An error occured: ${err.message}`);
  });