Etcetera

This is a Rust library that allows you to determine the locations of configuration, data, cache & other files for your application. Existing Rust libraries generally do not give you a choice in terms of which standards/conventions they follow. Etcetera, on the other hand, gives you the choice.

MSRV: 1.87.0

Note: The MSRV was raised to 1.87.0 in v0.11 to remove the dependency on the home crate & instead use the undeprecated std::env::home_dir. If you want, you can use v0.9 with an MSRV of 1.70.0 or v0.10 with an MSRV of 1.81.0 instead.

Conventions

Etcetera supports the following conventions:

• the XDG base directory
• Apple's Standard Directories
• Window's Known Folder Locations
• the "Unix Single-folder Convention" i.e. everything in ~/.myapp

Strategies

Etcetera has 2 modes of operation: BaseStrategy & AppStrategy:

• With BaseStrategy, you just get the location of the respective directory. For eg. for config_dir():
  • XDG: ~/.config
  • Apple: ~/Library/Preferences
  • Windows: ~\AppData\Roaming
• With AppStrategy, you provide additional information to get the location of your app directory. For eg. if you provide the following details: { top_level_domain: "org", author: "Acme Corp", app_name: "Frobnicator Plus" }, you'll get:
  • XDG: ~/.config/frobnicator-plus
  • Unix: ~/.frobnicator-plus
  • Apple: ~/Library/Preferences/org.acme-corp.Frobnicator-Plus
  • Windows: ~\AppData\Roaming\Acme Corp\Frobnicator Plus

Note: the location of the home (~) is determined by std::env::home_dir.

Convenience functions

Etcetera also provides convenience functions for selecting the appropriate strategy on each platform:

• base_strategy::choose_base_strategy & app_strategy::choose_app_strategy: Uses Windows on Windows & XDG everywhere else. This is used by most CLI tools & some GUI tools on each platform.
• base_strategy::choose_native_strategy & app_strategy::choose_native_strategy: Uses Windows on Windows, Apple on macOS/iOS, & XDG everywhere else. This is used by most GUI applications on each platform.

See the documentation for examples.