Try the "delay" function built into Node.

Preface#

In actual development, we often encounter situations where we need to perform "delay" operations in asynchronous operations. Usually, we write a util function similar to the following to handle it.

const delay = (ms: number) => new Promise((r) => setTimeout(r, ms));

This is good, concise, and perfectly fits our needs. However, if your code runs in a pure node environment, there is a new alternative solution to consider.

Using the node Timers Promises API#

Why not try the setTimeout function provided by the Timers Promises API supported by node starting from v15.0.0? It returns a Promise that behaves similarly to the delay function we just mentioned, while also supporting more usage.

import { setTimeout } from 'node:timers/promises'

const sayHi = async () => {
  console.log('Hi!')
}

const doSomethingAsync = async () => {
  console.log('yolo!')
  
  await setTimeout(1000)

  await sayHi()

  const res = await setTimeout(1000, 'result');

  console.log("res is: ", res)
}

doSomethingAsync()

The output of the above code is as follows.

yolo! # Output immediately
Hi! # Output after one second
res is:  result # Output after another second

For more details, please refer to the Node.js official documentation.