fs.createWriteStream does not immediately create file?

You shouldn’t call write on your tempFile write stream until you’ve received the 'open' event from the stream. The file won’t exist until you see that event.

For your function:

function download(url, tempFilepath, filepath, callback) {
    var tempFile = fs.createWriteStream(tempFilepath);
    tempFile.on('open', function(fd) {
        http.request(url, function(res) {
            res.on('data', function(chunk) {
                tempFile.write(chunk);
            }).on('end', function() {
                tempFile.end();
                fs.renameSync(tempFile.path, filepath);
                return callback(filepath);
            });
        });
    });
}

For your test:

var ws = fs.createWriteStream('anypath');
ws.on('open', function(fd) {
    console.log(fs.existsSync('anypath'));
    console.log(fs.existsSync('anypath'));
    console.log(fs.existsSync('anypath'));
});