Why won't fs.readFileSync detect my json file

Question

I'm trying to make a discord bot that can output certain data from my JSON file, and my project structure looks like this.

Project
|
+-- data/
|    |
|    +-- compSciCourses.json
|
+-- src/
|    |
|    +-- search.js
|    +-- bot.js
|
+-- test/
|    | 
|    +-- test.js
|
+-- .env
|
+-- package.json
|
+-- package-lock.json

Using search.js, I'm trying to read JSON data with the fs.readFileSync() like this

// src/search.js
const fs = require('fs');

let rawdata = fs.readFileSync("../data/compSciCourses.json")
let courseData = JSON.parse(rawdata)

const findClass = (input) => {
       // Some code
}

module.exports = { findClass }

I'm trying to call the function findClass from my bot.js

// src/bot.js
const { Client } = require('discord.js')
const search = require('./search')
const client = new Client()
...

client.on('message', (message) => {
        ...
        if (CMD_NAME === 'find') {
            if (args.length === 0)
                return message.reply("Please provide course name")
            else
                return message.reply(search.findClass(args))
        } 
    }
})

...

When I run this with node src/bot.js , I got this error.

fs.js:114
    throw err;
    ^

Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '../data/compSciCourses.json'
    at Object.openSync (fs.js:443:3)
    at Object.readFileSync (fs.js:343:35)
    at Object.<anonymous> (/Users/michaelchang/Desktop/Programming Playground/Machine Learning/ChatBots/discordBot/courseNavigator/src/search.js:3:18)
    at Module._compile (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:778:30)
    at Object.Module._extensions..js (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:789:10)
    at Module.load (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:653:32)
    at tryModuleLoad (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:593:12)
    at Function.Module._load (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:585:3)
    at Module.require (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:692:17)
    at require (internal/modules/cjs/helpers.js:25:18)
npm ERR! code ELIFECYCLE
npm ERR! errno 1
npm ERR! coursenavigator@1.0.0 start: `node ./src/bot.js`
npm ERR! Exit status 1
npm ERR! 
npm ERR! Failed at the coursenavigator@1.0.0 start script.
npm ERR! This is probably not a problem with npm. There is likely additional logging output above.

npm ERR! A complete log of this run can be found in:
npm ERR!     /Users/michaelchang/.npm/_logs/2020-09-01T00_25_12_050Z-debug.log

I don't understand how I get this error because I already specified the JSON file at the right directory. Can someone please help me???

Answer 1

You can resolve the path relative the location of the source file - rather than the current directory - using path.resolve:

const path = require("path");
const file = fs.readFileSync(path.resolve(__dirname, "../data/compSciCourses.json"));

Check this link for further info

Answer 2

Faced this issue in my project I solved it just by importing the.json file

const data = require("../data/compSciCourses.json")

your IDE might give you autocompletion for the path:)