homebase

A place for your app to call home.

homebase provides a platform independent API for querying paths in which applications can write caches, data, configs, and other information.

rationale

Since each operating system expects applications to write their data to OS dependant paths, managing cache writing on portable applications can become difficult.

For example, on macOS:

~/Library/Application Support/app_name

while on Linux it may be:

~/.local/share/app_name

and on Windows:

c:\users\<user_name>\AppData\Local/app_name

and the problem gets worse if you are running inside of a virtualenv

A similar issue happens for other forms of data, like caches, logs, configuration files, or application state.

Installation

python setup.py install

Usage

import homebase

app_name = "my_app"
app_author = "nakatomi-corp"
user_data_dir = homebase.user_data_dir(app_name=app_name, app_author=app_author)
user_cache_dir = homebase.user_cache_dir(app_name=app_name, app_author=app_author)
user_logs_dir = homebase.user_logs_dir(app_name=app_name, app_author=app_author)
user_config_dir = homebase.user_config_dir(app_name=app_name, app_author=app_author)
user_state_dir = homebase.user_state_dir(app_name=app_name, app_author=app_author)

# site specific directories, e.g. /usr/share
site_data_dir = homebase.site_data_dir(app_name=app_name, app_author=app_author)
site_config_dir = homebase.site_config_dir(app_name=app_name, app_author=app_author)

If you are running inside of a virtualenv, homebase will return paths that are relative to that environment. If you still want the user path, pass use_virtualenv=False in the call.

For example, suppose you have set up a virtual environment in /home/username/env on linux

import homebase

app_name = "my_app"
app_author = "nakatomi-corp"
user_data_dir = homebase.user_data_dir(app_name=app_name, app_author=app_author)
# /home/username/env/data/my_app
user_data_dir = homebase.user_data_dir(app_name=app_name, app_author=app_author, use_virtualenv=False)
# /home/username/.local/share/my_app.

See the [documentation](# TODO) for more details and examples.

License

See LICENSE.txt

Acknowledgement

This project is inspired by and is derived from appdirs