export-dir

Node.JS module which allows you to require all of the files in an entire directory with a single call to require.

Rationale

The default behavior of the Node.JS require function when you give it a directory path, for example require('./mymodules'), is to look for an index.js file in the relative directory mymodules.

That is, it will load ./mymodules/index.js This is useful, but sometimes you kind of wish that it imported all of the scripts in that directory instead.

Example

Suppose I have a directory structure like so:

* app.js        // contains code dependent on mymodules
-mymodules      // directory
  * first.js    // contains -- module.exports = { name: 'first' }
  * second.js   // contains -- module.exports = { name: 'second' }
  - third       // directory
    * index.js  // contains -- module.exports = { name: 'third' }
  - more        // directory
    * fourth.js // contains -- module.exports = { name: 'fourth' }
    * fifth.js  // contains -- module.exports = { name: 'fifth' }

The default behavior of Node.JS when you call require on mymodules would be to only load index.js. You could fix this by having index.js import all of its sibling files and directories, but everytime you add or remove a file you would have to go back update this index.js.

Sometimes I would like to be able to call require on mymodules and have it return an object such as below with properties for each of the modules it contains. I don't want to have to update an index.js everytime I add or remove something from mymodules.

 {
    first: {
        name: 'first'
    },
    second: {
        name: 'second'
    },
    third: {
        name: 'third'
    },
    more: {
        fourth: {
            name: 'fourth'
        },
        fifth: {
            name: 'fifth'
        }
    }
 }

Usage

You should include export-dir as a dependency in your package.json file, you may do so by runnning:

npm install export-dir --save

In order to get an object like that in the example above when requiring a directory we will still need to add an index.js file to it. However, it only contains 2 lines which do not change and we don't have to update it when we add or remove things from the directory.

var exportDir = require('export-dir');
module.exports = exportDir(__dirname);

In the above example you would need to create an index.js file like this in both the ./mymodules directory and in ./mymodules/more in order to get the exported object shown above.

Note that because export-dir creates an object with properties based on the file and directory names exported you will not be able to use filenames that are not valid JavaScript property names. For example my-module must become myModule or something similar.

Testing

This project uses the mocha module for testing. This dependencies is only for development and is not needed for use of export-dir. In order to install the development dependencies and run the tests using npm please run:

npm install -d
npm test

API

export-dir currently consists of a single function which expects a first argument to be a string which points to the path of the directory containing modules to be exported. The path argument can be input using __dirname.

exportDir(path, options)

The function may also accept an optional second parameter which is an object with properties enabling or disabling options. The currently are shown here:

// index.js -- do not export any json files in the current directory. module.exports = exportDir(__dirname, { excludeJSON: true });