Get a list of files in a react web application - reactjs

Question

I have a directory full of text files that I need to read in my react web app
-resources
|-file1.txt
|-file2.txt
|-file3.txt
I would like to store this resources directory somewhere in the app such that the contents of resources can be listed, and individual files can be iterated over on a line-by-line basis.
currently, I'm stuck on listing the files. I'm storing them like this
-node_modules
-public
|-resources
||-file1.txt
||-...
-src
But I really don't care where the resources directory is located. I tried using list-react-files based on this, but got Module not found: Error: Can't resolve 'fs'.
for further context, I was thinking the code to scan for files would be in in App.js, such that the scanned files could be used to populate certain components.
import React from "react"
import './App.css';
...
function App() {
//searching for files
var files = [...];
return(
//create components which can list and work with the files
...
);
}
export default App;
So, to summarize the question, how can I list files in reactJS?
p.s.:
this project was made with create-react-app
part of the point is that it should be easy to add new files to this directory, but I see no reason this process has to be "dynamic"

Answer 1

When people are using your react page, it is "running" on their computer and the software does not have access to all the files and data you'd like to use.
You will need to do this at "build time" when your service is being packaged up, or "on the server".
When you are building your react app, you can hook into processes that can find files and perform operations on them. Gatsby might be your best bet. Look at how people add "markup" files to their projects, built a menu from them and then render them as blog articles. NextJS, Vite, and other frameworks and tools will work, you may just need to learn a bit more.
The other approach, to do this "on the server" means when you are running code on the server you can do almost anything you like. So, your react app would make a call (e.g. rest request) to the server (e.g. NodeJS), and the code running on the server can use fs and other APIs to accomplish what you'd like.
From what you describe, doing this as part of your build step is probably the best route. A much easier route is to move this data into a JSON file and/or a database and not crawl the file system.

Answer 2

Looks like its a client side rendering app and not server side (node app). Resources folder you trying to list is residing in server and react app (javascript) running on browser can't access it directly.

Answer 3

To whom it may concern, I spent more time than I should have working on this. I highly recommend converting everything to JSON files and importing them. If you want to be able to scan for JSON files, make a JSON file that includes the names of all your files, then import that and use that for scanning. Doing things dynamically is a bare.
If you don't reformat, you'll likely need to use Fetch, which is asynchronous, which opens up a whole can of worms if you're using a framework like React.
If you're just importing json files, it's super easy:
import files from './resources/index.json';
where index.json looks like
{
"files":[
"file1.json",
"file2.json"
]
}
if you need to import the files more dynamically (not at the very beginning) you can use this:
var data = require('./resources/'+filename)
this will allow you to scan through your files using the index.json file, and load them dynamically as needed.