How to run a Promises array in a series

Put the following code in a file and run it with Node.js:

var calls = [];

var promises = [
  new Promise(function (resolve) {
    setTimeout(function () {
      calls.push('first');

      resolve();
    }, 100);
  }),
  new Promise(function (resolve) {
    calls.push('second');

    resolve();
  }),
];

setTimeout(function () {
  console.log(calls);
}, 100);

Please be aware the following code is bad practice, I'm creating a side-effect with a Promise, and side-effects like that can be hard to debug.

Why did calls have content? And why was it ['second', 'first'] and not the other way around? That's because of how Promises behave, they execute as soon as the JS engine goes over them, not when you call .then() on them, and the first one runs (approximately) 100ms after the second one because of the setTimeout.

So then, can we somehow run Promises synchronously? Even if that sorta defeats the point of Promises? Yes you can.

You can game the JS engine a bit.

Try running the following:

var Promise = require('bluebird');

var calls = [];

var promises = [
  function () {
    return new Promise(function (resolve) {
      setTimeout(function () {
        calls.push('first');

        resolve();
      }, 100);
    });
  },
  function () {
    return new Promise(function (resolve) {
      calls.push('second');

      resolve();
    });
  },
];

Promise
  .each(promises, function (promise) {
    return promise();
  })
  .then(function () {
    console.log(calls);
  });

The output is ['first', 'second']! How are the Promises running synchronously?

The answer is simple, first, they are now defined inside function, the function's contents aren't executed until the function is invoked, which is done by the Promise.each, and the way Promise.each works is that if you return a then-able it will wait until the then-able resolves in order to continue with the next thing in the loop.

And that's it, because we're not executing the function until the previous function's output's then-able resolves, the Promises are run in order.

It's a simple yet clever trick. Many thanks to my coworker @pateketrueke for figuring this stuff out with me.