@homer0/path-utils

🗂 Path utils

An easy way to manage locations and build paths relative to those locations on a Node app.

When writing static require/import statements is easy: The file you are requiring is relative to the one you are updating. But when you are reading files or doing require/import with dynamic paths, it can get messy pretty fast, and that's where this utility shines.

🍿 Usage

• ⚠️ This package is only for Node.
• If you are wondering why I built this, go to the Motivation section.

• ⚙️ Examples
• 🤘 Development

⚙️ Examples

Let's say your app tree looks like this:

myApp/
├── config/
│   ├── development.js
│   └── production.js
└── app/
    └── index.js

And you want to access config/development.js, but when you build your app, or prepare it to deployment, it becomes this:

myApp/
├── dist/
│   └── app/
│       └── index.min.js
├── config/
│   ├── development.js
│   └── production.js
└── app/
    └── index.js

There's a lot of ways to check whether you need to call ../config or ../../config: TryCatch, check some environment variable, check if ../config exists, etc. Well, with PathUtils, you don't need to do that, because the service knowns that if you ask for config/development.js, it's relative to your project root directory.

import { pathUtils } from '@homer0/path-utils';

const paths = pathUtils();
const devConfigPath = paths.join('config/development');
// or paths.join('config', 'development');

Done, now you can require/import or even use fs to access the file.

Multiple locations

By default, PathUtils uses the home location, which is the project root directory, but it also has an app location, and the ability to register new locations:

The app location is the directory where your app executable file is located, for the project tree used on the example above, the app location is /app on development, and /dist/app when builded/deployed. Those paths are assuming you are running the app with node [file] and not through som other tool, as the app path is basically process.argv[1].

Now, to register new locations, you use the addLocation method:

pathUtils.addLocation('my-location', 'some-folder/some-sub-folder');

The new location path must be relative to your project root directory.

Then, to use those locations, you can call joinFrom instead of join:

const pathToFile = pathUtils.joinFrom('my-location', 'some-file.js');

Jimple provider

If your app uses a Jimple container, you can register PathUtils as the pathUtils service by using its provider:

import { pathUtilsProvider } from '@homer0/path-utils';

// ...

container.register(pathUtilsProvider);

// ...

const paths = container.get('pathUtils');

And since the provider is a "provider creator" (created with my custom version of Jimple), you can customize its service name, and even the constructor options:

container.register(
  pathUtilsProvider({
    serviceName: 'myPathUtils',
    home: '/some-other-root-folder',
    locations: {
      'my-location': '/some-other-root-folder/some-folder',
    },
  }),
);

🤘 Development

As this project is part of the packages monorepo, some of the tooling, like ESLint and Husky, are installed on the root's package.json.

NPM tasks

Task	Description
test	Runs the unit tests.
build	Bundles the project.

Motivation

This used to be part of the wootils package, my personal lib of utilities, but I decided to extract them into individual packages, as part of the packages monorepo, and take the oportunity to migrate them to TypeScript.

Nowadays there's almost no app that doesn't make requests to one or more external APIs, that's why I built this service.