6-files-and-directories.mdx

import { FileTree, Tabs, Tab } from 'nextra/components'

Files & Directories

Lune has a built-in library for interacting with the filesystem, fs. This library will let you read, write, move, copy files & directories, and more.

Example File Tree

Let's use this directory & file tree structure for our examples:

Show file contents

<Tabs items={['hello-world.json', 'files/coolstuff.toml', 'files/super.secret.txt']}> json copy filename="hello-world.json" { "Hello": "World" } toml copy filename="coolstuff.toml" [you] cool = true awesome = "yep" txt copy filename="super.secret.txt" Hey you're not supposed to be in here!

Files

Reading and writing files using the fs library is very simple and only involves strings:

local fs = require("@lune/fs")

--> Print out the contents of all of the files
print(fs.readFile("hello-world.json"))
print(fs.readFile("files/coolstuff.toml"))
print(fs.readFile("files/super.secret.txt"))

--> Create a new file in our "files" directory
fs.writeFile("files/My Favorite Numbers.txt", "2 4 6 8 0 😃")

--> Write to one of our files, overwriting any previous contents
fs.writeFile("files/super.secret.txt", "Super secret message")

--> Remove the new file we created in our "files" directory
fs.removeFile("files/My Favorite Numbers.txt")

Note that the filesystem library deals with raw strings for file contents, and does not differentiate between if the contents of the file are using binary, utf-8, or some other encoding. It is up to you to know how your files are structured and handle them appropriately.

Directories

Reading and creating directories has a very similar API, but slightly different parameters and return values:

local fs = require("@lune/fs")

--[[
	Print out the entries found in our directory.
	The "." here means the current directory.

	This will output:
	* 📄 files.luau
	* 📄 dirs.luau
	* 📄 hello-world.json
	* 📁 files
]]
for _, entry in fs.readDir(".") do
	if fs.isDir(entry) then
		print("📁 " .. entry)
	elseif fs.isFile(entry) then
		print("📄 " .. entry)
	end
end

--> Create a new directory next to the above entries
fs.writeDir("myCoolDir")

--> Create a new directory in our "files" directory
fs.writeDir("files/myCoolSecondDir")

--> Remove the entire files directory
fs.removeDir("files")

In the above example:

• fs.readDir returns a table (array) of strings, with file and directory names
• fs.writeDir takes only the directory name (path) to create a directory at
• fs.removeDir removes the directory and everything inside it, use with caution

Resulting File Tree

This is what our directory & file tree structure would look like after running the above examples: