xpipe^{[^1]}

Use cross-platform IPC paths in Node.js.

Background

In Node.js - instead of using TCP - you also can take IPC^{[^2]} 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 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

``javascript
// CommonJS (CJS) require
const xpipe = require('xpipe');
`

`javascript
// ECMAScript Modules (ESM) import
import xpipe from 'xpipe';
`

$3

`javascript
let prefix = xpipe.prefix;
console.log(prefix: ${prefix});

// [empty string] on Linux and macOS
// "//./pipe/" on Windows
`

$3

`javascript
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
``

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:

- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(computing)

 

[^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