xpipe1
Use cross-platform IPC paths in Node.js.
In Node.js - instead of using TCP - you also can take IPC2 to communicate to services like
- web servers (NGINX, Caddy)
- databases (redis, PostgreSQL, MongoDB)
- etc.
or to interconnect Node.js apps, Electron frontends/backends and so on.
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 NPFS3, mounted under the special path \\.\pipe\.
To mitigate these differences and to to support writing portable code, xpipe was born...
npm install xpipe
// CommonJS (CJS) require
const xpipe = require('xpipe');
// ECMAScript Modules (ESM) import
import xpipe from 'xpipe';
let prefix = xpipe.prefix;
console.log(`prefix: ${prefix}`);
// [empty string] on Linux and macOS
// "//./pipe/" on Windows
let ipcPath = xpipe.eq('/tmp/my.sock');
console.log(`ipcPath: ${ipcPath}`);
// Returns a cross-platform IPC path:
// "/tmp/my.sock" on Linux and OS X
// "//./pipe/tmp/my.sock" on Windows
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 work4
- dir ./ /B fails but dir "./" /B works
Further articles:
-
xpipe stands for xp (cross-platform) IPC path equalizer ↩
-
inter-process communication, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-process_communication ↩
-
named pipe file system (in-memory) ↩
-
on Windows "/" without a leading drive letter represents the root of the current drive ↩