homedir

homedir is a small Rust crate that provides a portable way to get a user’s home directory on both Windows and Unix systems. Its API is deliberately simple: home returns the home directory of any user given their username, and my_home returns the home directory of the user running the current process.

Unlike crates that only resolve the current user’s directory, homedir can look up arbitrary users by name via the platform’s password database on Unix and the appropriate Windows APIs, making it useful for multi-user tools and services.

What You Get

• A my_home function to get the current process user’s home directory.
• A home function to look up any user’s home directory by username.
• Cross-platform support covering both Windows and Unix systems.
• A tiny dependency footprint focused solely on home-directory resolution.

Common Use Cases

• Resolving the current user’s home directory for config or cache file paths.
• Looking up another user’s home directory in multi-user CLI tools or daemons.
• Writing portable Rust tools that must behave correctly on both Windows and Unix.

Under The Hood

Architecture - The crate wraps platform-specific home-directory resolution behind a unified two-function API. On Unix it calls into libc’s password-database functions (getpwnam_r, getpwuid_r, getuid) to resolve arbitrary users; on Windows it uses the user-profile APIs, with documented handling for programs that also use the COM library elsewhere.

Tech Stack - Pure Rust with thin platform bindings (libc on Unix, Windows APIs on Windows) and no heavyweight dependencies, keeping it lightweight as advertised.

Code Quality - The repo runs GitHub Actions CI and publishes docs.rs documentation across 10 releases; it is small and focused, though maintained by a small team with low recent activity. The README is candid about platform limitations (systems lacking the required Unix functions).

API Design - The surface is two clearly named functions returning the home directory as a path, which makes it approachable; the README also honestly points users to alternatives like directories when only the current user’s directory is needed.