Saving JSON in Electron

Question

I am building an app using Electron. In this app, I am building a data structure using JSON. My data structure looks like this:

{
  items: [
    { id:1, name:'football' },
    { id:2, name:'soccer ball' },
    { id:3, name:'basketball' }
  ]
}

I want to save this JSON to a file called "data.json". I want to save it to a file because I want to load the next time the application starts. My challenge is, I do not know how to save the data. In fact, I'm not sure where I should even save the file. Do I save it in the same directory as the app? Or is there some cross-platform approach I should use?

Currently, I have the following:

saveClick: function() {
  var json = JSON.stringify(this.data);
  // assume json matches the JSON provided above.
  // Now, I'm not sure how to actually save the file.
} 

So, how / where do I save JSON to the local file system for use at a later time?

Answer 1

Electron lacks an easy way to persist and read user settings for your application. electron-json-storage implements an API somehow similar to localStorage to write and read JSON objects to/from the operating system application data directory, as defined by app.getPath('userData').

Answer 2

I wrote a simple library that you can use, with a simple interface, it also creates subdirectories and works with promises/callbacks. it will save the data into app.getPath("appData") as the root folder.

https://github.com/ran-y/electron-storage

Installation

$ npm install --save electron-storage

usage

const storage = require('electron-storage');

API

storage.get(filePath, (err, data) => {
  if (err) {
    console.error(err)
      } else {
        console.log(data);
      }
    });

storage.get(filePath)
    .then(data => {
      console.log(data);
    })
    .catch(err => {
      console.error(err);
    });

storage.set(filePath, data, (err) => {
      if (err) {
        console.error(err)
      }
    });

storage.set(filePath, data)
    .then(data => {
      console.log(data);
    })
    .catch(err => {
      console.error(err);
    });