How to solve the `util.pump is not a function` error in Node.js

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Published Aug 17 2020

Find out how to solve the `util.pump is not a function` error that might happen when trying to run old Node code

If you experience the error “util.pump is not a function” while running a Node.js app or a Node.js snippet, it’s because the app code is too old for the current Node.js runtime.

The pump() method that Node.js provided wrote a readable stream to a writable stream using this syntax:

util.pump(readableStream, writableStream)

This method is now gone, deprecated for a long time and removed when Node.js 6.0 was released in April 2016.

Luckily, it’s easy to fix this problem.

Replace the above syntax with:

const { pipeline } = require('stream')

//...

pipeline(readableStream, writableStream, () => {})

The third argument is a callback function that will be called when the pipeline is done.