While the accepted answer works, it is worth noting that this will fire at a high rate. This can cause performance issues for computationally expensive operations.
The recommendation from MDN is to throttle the events. Below is a modification of their sample, enhanced to detect scroll direction.
Modified from: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/scroll_event
// ## function declaration
function scrollEventThrottle(fn) {
let last_known_scroll_position = 0;
let ticking = false;
window.addEventListener("scroll", function () {
let previous_known_scroll_position = last_known_scroll_position;
last_known_scroll_position = window.scrollY;
if (!ticking) {
window.requestAnimationFrame(function () {
fn(last_known_scroll_position, previous_known_scroll_position);
ticking = false;
});
ticking = true;
}
});
}
// ## function instantiation
scrollEventThrottle((scrollPos, previousScrollPos) => {
if (previousScrollPos > scrollPos) {
console.log("going up");
} else {
console.log("going down");
}
});