How may I reference the script tag that loaded the currently-executing script?

Question

How to get the current script element:

1. Use document.currentScript

document.currentScript will return the <script> element whose script is currently being processed.

<script>
var me = document.currentScript;
</script>

Benefits

• Simple and explicit. Reliable.
• Don't need to modify the script tag
• Works with asynchronous scripts (defer & async)
• Works with scripts inserted dynamically

Problems

• Will not work in older browsers and IE.
• Does not work with modules <script type="module">

2. Select script by id

Giving the script an id attribute will let you easily select it by id from within using document.getElementById().

<script id="myscript">
var me = document.getElementById('myscript');
</script>

Benefits

• Simple and explicit. Reliable.
• Almost universally supported
• Works with asynchronous scripts (defer & async)
• Works with scripts inserted dynamically

Problems

• Requires adding a custom attribute to the script tag
• id attribute may cause weird behaviour for scripts in some browsers for some edge cases

3. Select the script using a data-* attribute

Giving the script a data-* attribute will let you easily select it from within.

<script data-name="myscript">
var me = document.querySelector('script[data-name="myscript"]');
</script>

This has few benefits over the previous option.

Benefits

• Simple and explicit.
• Works with asynchronous scripts (defer & async)
• Works with scripts inserted dynamically

Problems

• Requires adding a custom attribute to the script tag
• HTML5, and querySelector() not compliant in all browsers
• Less widely supported than using the id attribute
• Will get around <script> with id edge cases.
• May get confused if another element has the same data attribute and value on the page.

4. Select the script by src

Instead of using the data attributes, you can use the selector to choose the script by source:

<script src="//example.com/embed.js"></script>

In embed.js:

var me = document.querySelector('script[src="//example.com/embed.js"]');

Benefits

• Reliable
• Works with asynchronous scripts (defer & async)
• Works with scripts inserted dynamically
• No custom attributes or id needed

Problems

• Does not work for local scripts
• Will cause problems in different environments, like Development and Production
• Static and fragile. Changing the location of the script file will require modifying the script
• Less widely supported than using the id attribute
• Will cause problems if you load the same script twice

5. Loop over all scripts to find the one you want

We can also loop over every script element and check each individually to select the one we want:

<script>
var me = null;
var scripts = document.getElementsByTagName("script")
for (var i = 0; i < scripts.length; ++i) {
    if( isMe(scripts[i])){
      me = scripts[i];
    }
}
</script>

This lets us use both previous techniques in older browsers that don't support querySelector() well with attributes. For example:

function isMe(scriptElem){
    return scriptElem.getAttribute('src') === "//example.com/embed.js";
}

This inherits the benefits and problems of whatever approach is taken, but does not rely on querySelector() so will work in older browsers.

6. Get the last executed script

Since the scripts are executed sequentially, the last script element will very often be the currently running script:

<script>
var scripts = document.getElementsByTagName( 'script' );
var me = scripts[ scripts.length - 1 ];
</script>

Benefits

• Simple.
• Almost universally supported
• No custom attributes or id needed

Problems

• Does not work with asynchronous scripts (defer & async)
• Does not work with scripts inserted dynamically

Since scripts are executed sequentially, the currently executed script tag is always the last script tag on the page until then. So, to get the script tag, you can do:

var scripts = document.getElementsByTagName( 'script' );
var thisScriptTag = scripts[ scripts.length - 1 ];

Probably the easiest thing to do would be to give your scrip tag an id attribute.

Here's a bit of a polyfill that leverages document.CurrentScript if it exists and falls back to finding the script by ID.

<script id="uniqueScriptId">
    (function () {
        var thisScript = document.CurrentScript || document.getElementByID('uniqueScriptId');

        // your code referencing thisScript here
    ());
</script>

If you include this at the top of every script tag I believe you'll be able to consistently know which script tag is being fired, and you'll also be able to reference the script tag in the context of an asynchronous callback.

Untested, so leave feedback for others if you try it.

Script are executed sequentially only if they do not have either a "defer" or an "async" attribute. Knowing one of the possible ID/SRC/TITLE attributes of the script tag could work also in those cases. So both Greg and Justin suggestions are correct.

There is already a proposal for a document.currentScript on the WHATWG lists.

EDIT: Firefox > 4 already implement this very useful property but it is not available in IE11 last I checked and only available in Chrome 29 and Safari 8.

EDIT: Nobody mentioned the "document.scripts" collection but I believe that the following may be a good cross browser alternative to get the currently running script:

var me = document.scripts[document.scripts.length -1];

It must works at page load and when an script tag is added with javascript (ex. with ajax)

<script id="currentScript">
var $this = document.getElementById("currentScript");
$this.setAttribute("id","");
//...
</script>