Overview

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dirs is a small python library in the spirit of appdirs1 and other XDG focused directory libraries. However, there are several that I've identified with these other libraries:

1. Overengineered solutions to get a few simple paths
2. When Windows support is available, it reads from the registry, rather than using the recommended approach of using KnownFolderID.
3. No memoization of results. This can be costly when repeatedly working with filesystem paths
4. None of these libraries return a pathlib.Path object
5. None of these libraries use the typing module for better static analysis tooling
6. None of these libraries use dataclasses or attrs to prevent overwriting internals or "changing" state on the fly.

dirs tries to solve all of this by using ctypes under Windows for initial calls, functools.lru_cache for an alternative API, lazy generation of config_dirs and data_dirs on all platforms, and many others. Proper documentation will be uploaded at some point, but the code is fairly readable and easy to understand.

Example Use

from dirs import User, Site # Using `*` is also permitted

app = User('app-name')
print(app.config) # prints a joined path with User.config_home() and 'app-name'
print(User.config_home()) # This returns the Path as-is
for path in Site.config_dirs(): # This is a generator, so it's iterable
  print(f'{path} exists: {path.exists()}')