00mjk / appdirs

A small Python module for determining appropriate platform-specific dirs, e.g. a "user data dir".

Note: This project has been officially deprecated. You may want to check out https://pypi.org/project/platformdirs/ which is a more active fork of appdirs. Thanks to everyone who has used appdirs. Shout out to ActiveState for the time they gave their employees to work on this over the years.

the problem

What directory should your app use for storing user data? If running on macOS, you should use:

~/Library/Application Support/<AppName>

If on Windows (at least English Win XP) that should be:

C:\Documents and Settings\<User>\Application Data\Local Settings\<AppAuthor>\<AppName>

or possibly:

C:\Documents and Settings\<User>\Application Data\<AppAuthor>\<AppName>

for roaming profiles but that is another story.

On Linux (and other Unices) the dir, according to the XDG spec, is:

~/.local/share/<AppName>

appdirs to the rescue

This kind of thing is what the appdirs module is for. appdirs will help you choose an appropriate:

• user data dir (user_data_dir)
• user config dir (user_config_dir)
• user cache dir (user_cache_dir)
• site data dir (site_data_dir)
• site config dir (site_config_dir)
• user log dir (user_log_dir)

and also:

• is a single module so other Python packages can include their own private copy
• is slightly opinionated on the directory names used. Look for "OPINION" in documentation and code for when an opinion is being applied.

some example output

On macOS:

>>> from appdirs import *
>>> appname = "SuperApp"
>>> appauthor = "Acme"
>>> user_data_dir(appname, appauthor)
'/Users/trentm/Library/Application Support/SuperApp'
>>> site_data_dir(appname, appauthor)
'/Library/Application Support/SuperApp'
>>> user_cache_dir(appname, appauthor)
'/Users/trentm/Library/Caches/SuperApp'
>>> user_log_dir(appname, appauthor)
'/Users/trentm/Library/Logs/SuperApp'

On Windows 7:

>>> from appdirs import *
>>> appname = "SuperApp"
>>> appauthor = "Acme"
>>> user_data_dir(appname, appauthor)
'C:\\Users\\trentm\\AppData\\Local\\Acme\\SuperApp'
>>> user_data_dir(appname, appauthor, roaming=True)
'C:\\Users\\trentm\\AppData\\Roaming\\Acme\\SuperApp'
>>> user_cache_dir(appname, appauthor)
'C:\\Users\\trentm\\AppData\\Local\\Acme\\SuperApp\\Cache'
>>> user_log_dir(appname, appauthor)
'C:\\Users\\trentm\\AppData\\Local\\Acme\\SuperApp\\Logs'

On Linux:

>>> from appdirs import *
>>> appname = "SuperApp"
>>> appauthor = "Acme"
>>> user_data_dir(appname, appauthor)
'/home/trentm/.local/share/SuperApp
>>> site_data_dir(appname, appauthor)
'/usr/local/share/SuperApp'
>>> site_data_dir(appname, appauthor, multipath=True)
'/usr/local/share/SuperApp:/usr/share/SuperApp'
>>> user_cache_dir(appname, appauthor)
'/home/trentm/.cache/SuperApp'
>>> user_log_dir(appname, appauthor)
'/home/trentm/.cache/SuperApp/log'
>>> user_config_dir(appname)
'/home/trentm/.config/SuperApp'
>>> site_config_dir(appname)
'/etc/xdg/SuperApp'
>>> os.environ['XDG_CONFIG_DIRS'] = '/etc:/usr/local/etc'
>>> site_config_dir(appname, multipath=True)
'/etc/SuperApp:/usr/local/etc/SuperApp'

AppDirs for convenience

>>> from appdirs import AppDirs
>>> dirs = AppDirs("SuperApp", "Acme")
>>> dirs.user_data_dir
'/Users/trentm/Library/Application Support/SuperApp'
>>> dirs.site_data_dir
'/Library/Application Support/SuperApp'
>>> dirs.user_cache_dir
'/Users/trentm/Library/Caches/SuperApp'
>>> dirs.user_log_dir
'/Users/trentm/Library/Logs/SuperApp'

Per-version isolation

If you have multiple versions of your app in use that you want to be able to run side-by-side, then you may want version-isolation for these dirs:

>>> from appdirs import AppDirs
>>> dirs = AppDirs("SuperApp", "Acme", version="1.0")
>>> dirs.user_data_dir
'/Users/trentm/Library/Application Support/SuperApp/1.0'
>>> dirs.site_data_dir
'/Library/Application Support/SuperApp/1.0'
>>> dirs.user_cache_dir
'/Users/trentm/Library/Caches/SuperApp/1.0'
>>> dirs.user_log_dir
'/Users/trentm/Library/Logs/SuperApp/1.0'