briandconnelly / xdgbasedir

R implementation of X Desktop Group Base Directory Specification

xdgbasedir

xdgbasedir is R package that allows you to work with paths that comply with the XDG Base Directory Specification.

These functions allow you to get the value associated with the relevant environment variable and to build paths from them:

XDG Variable	xdgbasedir function
$XDG_CACHE_HOME	path_xdg_cache_home()
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME	path_xdg_config_home()
$XDG_DATA_HOME	path_xdg_data_home()
$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR	path_xdg_runtime_dir()
$XDG_STATE_HOME	path_xdg_state_home()

For example, we get the path for storing our configuration file, myconfig.json (on MacOS):

library(xdgbasedir)

path_xdg_config_home("myconfig.json")
#> /Users/bconnelly/.config/myconfig.json

These functions allow you to get an ordered list of directories:

XDG Variable.	xdgbasedir function
$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS	path_xdg_config_dirs()
$XDG_DATA_DIRS	path_xdg_data_dirs()

path_xdg_data_dirs()
#> [1] "/usr/local/share/" "/usr/share/"

Installation

You can install the development version of xdgbasedir like so:

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("briandconnelly/xdgbasedir")

Example

Let’s say we wanted to read our RStudio Desktop preferences file, rstudio-prefs.json. Since RStudio complies with the XDG Base Directory Specification, we can easily find that file no matter how the user has configured their environment.

library(xdgbasedir)

prefs_file <- path_xdg_config_home("rstudio-prefs.json")
prefs_file
#> /Users/bconnelly/.config/rstudio-prefs.json