path-is-inside

What is path-is-inside?

The path-is-inside npm package is used to determine if one path is inside another path. This can be useful for ensuring that a file is within a certain directory structure, for security checks to prevent directory traversal attacks, or for validating file locations in a project.

What are path-is-inside's main functionalities?

Check if a path is inside another path

This feature allows you to check if one path is contained within another path. It returns a boolean value indicating the result.

const pathIsInside = require('path-is-inside');

let inside = pathIsInside('/the/path', '/the'); // true
let notInside = pathIsInside('/the/path', '/another/path'); // false

Other packages similar to path-is-inside

is-path-inside

This package provides similar functionality to path-is-inside, allowing you to check if one path is inside another. It is a lightweight package with minimal dependencies.

is-subdir

is-subdir is another package that checks if a directory is a subdirectory of another. It compares to path-is-inside by offering a similar check but may have different implementation details or dependencies.

README

Is This Path Inside This Other Path?

It turns out this question isn't trivial to answer using Node's built-in path APIs. A naive indexOf-based solution will fail sometimes on Windows, which is case-insensitive (see e.g. isaacs/npm#4214). You might then think to be clever with path.resolve, but you have to be careful to account for situations whether the paths have different drive letters, or else you'll cause bugs like isaacs/npm#4313. And let's not even get started on trailing slashes.

The path-is-inside package will give you a robust, cross-platform way of detecting whether a given path is inside another path.

Usage

Pretty simple. First the path being tested; then the potential parent. Like so:

var pathIsInside = require("path-is-inside");

pathIsInside("/x/y/z", "/x/y") // true
pathIsInside("/x/y", "/x/y/z") // false

OS-Specific Behavior

Like Node's built-in path module, path-is-inside treats all file paths on Windows as case-insensitive, whereas it treats all file paths on *-nix operating systems as case-sensitive. Keep this in mind especially when working on a Mac, where, despite Node's defaults, the OS usually treats paths case-insensitively.

In practice, this means:

// On Windows

pathIsInside("C:\\X\\Y\\Z", "C:\\x\\y") // true

// On *-nix, including Mac OS X

pathIsInside("/X/Y/Z", "/x/y") // false