What's the difference between .pipe and pipeline on streams

Question

I found two different ways to pipe streams in node.js

Well known .pipe() method of a stream

https://nodejs.org/api/stream.html#stream_readable_pip

Answer 1

According to the documentation, they both do the same thing. But there some differences:

• .pipe() is a method of Readable, while pipeline is a module method of stream that accepts streams to pipe.
• pipeline() method provide a callback when the pipeline is complete.
• pipeline() method was added since 10 version of node, while .pipe exist from the earliest versions of Node.

In my opinion, with pipeline() code looks a bit cleaner, but you can use both of them.

Example of .pipe():

const fs = require('fs');
const r = fs.createReadStream('file.txt');
const z = zlib.createGzip();
const w = fs.createWriteStream('file.txt.gz');
r.pipe(z).pipe(w);

Example of pipeline():

const { pipeline } = require('stream');
const fs = require('fs');
const zlib = require('zlib');

pipeline(
  fs.createReadStream('archive.tar'),
  zlib.createGzip(),
  fs.createWriteStream('archive.tar.gz'),
  (err) => {
    if (err) {
      console.error('Pipeline failed.', err);
    } else {
      console.log('Pipeline succeeded.');
    }
  }
);