node-standardpaths

Receive common operating system standard paths in JavaScript and Node

Usage no npm install needed!

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README

node-standardpaths

This project is an attempt to bring QStandardPaths from the Qt Project to JavaScript and Node to get common platform-specific standard paths.

This includes paths like

  • the configuration directories used to store system and user configuration files,
  • data directories,
  • cache directories,
  • and several others. (see the QStandardPaths documentation for the planned paths)

Targeted platforms are all which Node supports, which are

  • Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris [XDG Base Directory Specification]
  • Darwin (Mac OS X, macOS)
  • Windows

Supported Paths

At the moment this library can report the following paths.

Type Description
HomePath Users home path
ConfigLocation Users configuration directory
SystemConfigLocation Global configuration directory

Unresolved Paths

Besides of getting the mentioned paths above, this library has the possibility to report any of the above paths in unresolved form, which means instead of a valid path you get the path with environment variables (for example $HOME instead of /home/user). The unresolved paths will never contain non-existent environment variables (for example if $XDG_CONFIG_HOME isn't set or empty, $HOME/.config will be returned instead).

Usage

Example code snippet

var standardpaths = require('node-standardpaths');

standardpaths.path(standardpaths.HomePath);
standardpaths.path(standardpaths.HomePath, false);

// returns the following
// on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris: '/home/user', '$HOME'
// on Darwin:                  '/Users/user', '$HOME'
// on Windows:                 'C:\Users\user' '%USERPROFILE%'

ATTENTION: the API is in the progress of being changed, please be aware of that.