How to wrap fs.exists() within a Promise

I have started using the Q module - an implementation of the Promises specification. One nifty function it provides is denodify. This makes it easy to convert a Node.js function (which takes a normal callback) into one which returns a Promise. All good until you decide you want to use fs.exists().

The issue is that fs.exists() takes a callback which is not expected to have an err parameter in its signature. Instead the callback will get passed a boolean value indicating whether the checked path exists or not. Here is the typical usage:

var fs = require('fs');

fs.exists('/tmp', function(exists) {
  if (exists) {
    // do something
  } else {
    // do something else
  }
});

So how can we rewrite this using a Promise?

We can use Q.defer() to create a new Promise and then we can use defer.resolve() as the callback:

var fs = require('fs');

var Q = require('q');

var defer = Q.defer();

fs.exists('/tmp', defer.resolve);

defer.promise.then(function(exists) {
  if (exists) {
    // do something
  } else {
    // do something else
  }
});

We can return the result of defer.promise.then(...) back to a caller. This result itself will be a Promise the caller can subsequently use.