$ cnpm install xpipe
xpipe[1]
Use cross-platform IPC paths in node.
Background
In node - instead of using TCP - you can also take IPC[2] to communicate to services like
- web servers (NGINX)
- data structure stores (redis)
- databases (MongoDB, Cassandra)
- etc.
or to interconnect node apps, Electron frontends/backends etc.
This can lead to large speed gains.
On unixoid operating systems - e.g. Linux and OS X - we use Unix domain sockets
that are referred by file descriptors.
Windows has named pipes for it, living
in the root directory of the NPFS[3], mounted under the special path \\.\pipe\.
To mitigate these differences and to to support writing portable code, xpipe was born...
Installation
npm install xpipe
Usage
const xpipe = require('xpipe');
let prefix = xpipe.prefix;
console.log( `prefix: ${prefix}` );
/*
[empty string] on Linux and OS X
"//./pipe/" on Windows
*/
let ipcPath = xpipe.eq('/tmp/my.sock');
console.log( `ipcPath: ${ipcPath}` );
/*
"/tmp/my.sock" on Linux and OS X
"//./pipe/tmp/my.sock" on Windows
*/
When did Windows start accepting forward slash as a path separator?
Every Windows API/kernel ever has accepted "/" as a path separator. So has every version of MS-DOS beginning with DOS 2.0 (the first version to support subdirectories).
It's only been in command lines that "/" was not allowed when it had already been used as a switch delimiter in MS-DOS 1.0 (introduced by IBM).
This behaviour could be bypassed (at least on modern Windows systems) by including the path in double quotation marks:
- cd c:/Windows and cd /Windows work[4]
- dir ./ /B fails but dir "./" /B works
Further articles:
[1]: xpipe stands for xp (cross-platform) IPC path equalizer
[2]: inter-process communication, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-process_communication
[3]: named pipe file system (in-memory)
[4]: on Windows "/" without a leading drive letter represents the root of the current drive
Current Tags
- 1.0.5 ... latest (10 years ago)
nodexo