Tauri Plugin FS

@tauri-apps/plugin-fs is the official Tauri plugin that gives your web-based frontend safe, cross-platform access to the native file system. It pairs a Rust core with typed JavaScript guest bindings so you can read, write, watch, and manage files and directories from your app’s UI code without shelling out or bundling a native module yourself.

Every operation runs through Tauri’s capability and scope system, so file access is explicitly permissioned rather than wide open. The same API works across Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS, giving you a single, familiar surface for file handling in desktop and mobile Tauri applications.

What You Get

• A typed JavaScript/TypeScript API covering reads, writes, directory operations, metadata, and file watching
• A Rust core (tauri-plugin-fs) that enforces Tauri’s capability and scope-based permission model on every operation
• Cross-platform support spanning Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS from one API
• A FileHandle abstraction plus helpers like readTextFileLines for streaming and line-by-line access
• Base-directory resolution and URL/path handling so paths stay portable across platforms

Common Use Cases

• Reading and writing user documents or app data from a Tauri desktop or mobile UI
• Persisting configuration, cache, or export files to platform-appropriate directories
• Watching files or folders and reacting to changes in real time within the app
• Building file-manager-style features (copy, move, delete, list) on top of native storage

Under The Hood

Architecture The plugin is split across two layers: TypeScript guest bindings in guest-js/index.ts (~1,500 lines) that your frontend imports, and a Rust core in src/ whose commands.rs (~1,900 lines) implements the actual file operations. Frontend calls are marshalled over Tauri’s IPC bridge to the Rust side, where lib.rs registers commands and file_path.rs plus scope.rs resolve and validate paths against the app’s configured capabilities before any disk access occurs. Platform-specific code lives in android.rs, ios.rs, and desktop.rs, with an optional notify-based watcher (watcher.rs) for change events.

Tech Stack The Rust core depends on tauri, serde/serde_json/serde_repr for IPC serialization, thiserror and anyhow for errors, glob for pattern matching, and the notify plus notify-debouncer-full crates (behind a watch feature) for filesystem watching; iOS builds pull in objc2-foundation. The JavaScript package is authored in TypeScript, bundled with Rollup into ESM, CJS, and type-declaration outputs, and depends only on @tauri-apps/api at runtime.

Code Quality The code is cleanly separated by concern and fully typed on both the Rust and TypeScript sides, with an explicit permissions/ directory codifying the security scopes. Error handling is centralized in error.rs. Test coverage on the JavaScript binding layer is thin (no dedicated JS unit test suite ships in the package; the visible tests live under the Android source tree), so correctness leans on the maturity of the Rust core and Tauri’s overall test infrastructure.

API Design The public JavaScript surface deliberately mirrors Node’s fs module, exposing readFile, writeFile, readTextFile, writeTextFile, mkdir, readDir, stat, lstat, rename, copyFile, remove, truncate, exists, size, and a watch/watchImmediate pair, alongside an open()/create() FileHandle abstraction and a readTextFileLines streaming helper. The familiar naming, consistent async signatures, and clear README setup instructions keep the boilerplate minimal once the plugin is registered in the Rust builder and the relevant capabilities are granted.