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application-path

Provides utility classes for querying application specific paths.

For user data or configuration, platform independent applications tend to use <user.home>/.<application> regardless of the platform. While this works fine on Linux, on Windows (and to a lesser extend macOS), this is messy. This library makes it easy to use a single API and still use platform specific paths. As a result, on Windows the user's own AppData\Roaming or AppData\Local folder will be used.

Currently, only the path to store user data or configuration is supported. This will use the following paths:

  • $HOME/.<application> or $HOME/.<organization>/<application> for Linux and Unix
  • $HOME/Library/Application Support/<application> or $HOME/Library/Application Support/<organization>/<application> for macOS
  • %HOME%\AppData\Roaming\<application>, %HOME%\AppData\Roaming\<organization>\<application>, %HOME%\AppData\Local\<application> or %HOME%\AppData\Local\<organization>\<application> for Windows

To retrieve the path for an application's user data or configuration, simply call ApplicationPath.userData:

Path userData1 = ApplicationPath.userData("My App");
// userData1 is $HOME/.My App on Linux, %HOME%\AppData\Roaming\My App on Windows
Path userData2 = ApplicationPath.userData("My Organization", "My App");
// userData2 is $HOME/.My Organization/My App on Linux, %HOME%\AppData\Roaming\My Organization\My App on Windows

To use %HOME%\AppData\Local on Windows, add the LOCAL option:

Path userData1 = ApplicationPath.userData("My App", UserDataOption.LOCAL);
// userData1 is $HOME/.My App on Linux, %HOME%\AppData\Local\My App on Windows
Path userData2 = ApplicationPath.userData("My Organization", "My App", UserDataOption.LOCAL);
// userData2 is $HOME/.My Organization/My App on Linux, %HOME%\AppData\Local\My Organization\My App on Windows

Note that the userData methods will not create any files or directories. It is the responsibility of the caller to create the path as necessary. This can usually be done using Files.createDirectories.