Proper way to reference files relative to application root in Node.JS

Question

I have a Node.JS application running on Linux at AWS EC2 that uses the fs module to read in HTML template files. Here is the current structure of the application:

/server.js /templates/my-template.html /services/template-reading-service.js 

The HTML templates will always be in that location, however, the template-reading-service may move around to different locations (deeper subdirectories, etc.) From within the template-reading-service I use fs.readFileSync() to load the file, like so:

var templateContent = fs.readFileSync('./templates/my-template.html', 'utf8'); 

This throws the following error:

Error: ENOENT, no such file or directory './templates/my-template.html' 

I'm assuming that is because the path './' is resolving to the '/services/' directory and not the application root. I've also tried changing the path to '../templates/my-template.html' and that worked, but it seems brittle because I imagine that is just resolving relative to 'up one directory'. If I move the template-reading-service to a deeper subdirectory, that path will break.

So, what is the proper way to reference files relative to the root of the application?

Answer 1

Try

var templateContent = fs.readFileSync(path.join(__dirname, '../templates') + '/my-template.html', 'utf8');