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