Cross-platform method to obtain the user's configuration home directory in Python?

Question

My program needs to store some configuration files. The major operating systems seems to have a designated location to place those; for instance, on Freedesktop.org compliant systems, it will be the path stored in the $XDG_CONFIG_HOME environment variable.

Is there a method (or a library) to obtain this configuration home directory across the major operating systems: Windows, OS X, Linux?

Answer 1

You can use the package appdirs. This is developed by ActiveState who must have quite a lot of experience on cross-platform python.

import appdirs
appdirs.user_config_dir(appname='MyApp')

The package is just a single file (/module), so if you need it for a small script it is simple to just copy what you need. Otherwise the package is available with both pip and conda.