Tips: How to set the current working directory of a Node.js program

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I had this problem with a Node.js script I wrote.

I had set relative paths to reference some files in the local filesystem, like this:

../../dev/file.md

and if I ran the program from the folder it was, no problem.

But if I ran the file from another folder, from example the parent folder, the relative links would break.

To fix this, at the beginning of the program, I set

const process = require('process')
process.chdir(__dirname)

This set the current working directory of the process to __dirname which points to the current file’s parent folder path.

Lessons in this unit:

0: Introduction
1: Axios crashes the Node.js process when the request fails
2: How to set up a cron job that runs a Node.js app
3: How to get both parsed body and raw body in Express
4: Interact with the Google Analytics API using Node.js
5: How to bulk convert file names using Node.js
6: How to deep copy JavaScript objects using structuredClone
7: How to handle file uploads in Node.js
8: How to send an email using nodemailer
9: Logging all the requests coming through an Express app
10: How to upload an image to S3 using Node.js
11: How to read a CSV file with Node.js
12: ▶︎ How to set the current working directory of a Node.js program
13: How to upload files to S3 from Node.js
14: How to write a CSV file with Node.js
15: Where to host a Node.js app
16: Parsing JSON with Node.js
17: nodemailer, how to embed an image into an email
18: The Pug Guide
19: Restarting a Node process without file changes
20: How to use Sequelize to interact with PostgreSQL