These quick tips are small snippets that come up again and again in my work, for which I want a permantent and central place to retrieve them.

Here's the situation: You want your node script to interact with a file that is relative to its location. To do that, you need a way to determine that location.

To get the absolute path to a module, you can use the global __dirname variable.

For the follwing snippets, suppose you run the module /home/urname/code/script/main.js

// this will print '/home/urname/code/script'
console.log(__dirname)

If you want the filename included as well, __filename will do the trick.

// this will print '/home/urname/code/script/main.js'
console.log(__filename)

Get the current working directory

Since it fits the topic somewhat, here's a small bonus: If you want to get the directory from which you called the script, you can use process.cwd() to do that.

Suppose you call /home/urname/code/script/main.js from the command line while you are inside /home/urname/code/temp:

// this will print '/home/urname/code/temp'
console.log(process.cwd())

Get the directory of the main script

Finally, if you write a plug-in and need to know the path of the main script, you can use require('path').dirname(require.main.filename).

Sources

https://attacomsian.com/blog/nodejs-get-current-directory
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9080085/node-js-find-home-directory-in-platform-agnostic-way
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3133243/how-do-i-get-the-path-to-the-current-script-with-node-js