Is there a more transparent way to access the root of a Node.js application besides process.cwd()?

Question

Is there a more transparent way to access the root of a Node.js application besides process.cwd()?

Is there a more transparent way to access the root of a Node.js application besides process.cwd()? - I am aware this is pretty transparent but I am just curious for those who may pick up the application later on and don't know what cwd() might infer.

To clarify - if my applicaiton lives in /var/www/node-app, I want to access that path from /var/www/node-app/any/nested/path.

node.js
filesystems

Answer 1

Root if a Node.js application is __dirname, not process.cwd()

ps: wait... technically there is no such thing as a root of the application. So you should clarify what do you mean by that.

Answer 2

Suppose you have an app called node-app in the path var/www/node-app with an entry point as index.js. Then define the following in index.js

  exports.path = __dirname;

Now assuming the other app is in var/www/some-other-deeper-path/new-app, and we require to know the path at which node-app is, we have to require node-app in new-app using

  var node-app = require('node-app');
  console.log(node-app.path); // this will log var/www/node-app