export-dir

Node.JS module which allows you to require all of the files in an entire directory with a single call to require.

Rationale

The default behavior of the Node.JS require function when you give it a directory path, for example require('./mymodules'), is to look for an index.js file in the relative directory mymodules.

Example

That is, it will load ./mymodules/index.js This is useful, but sometimes you kind of wish that it imported all of the scripts in that directory instead.

Suppose I have a directory structure like so:

-mymodules      // directory
  * first.js    // contains -- module.exports = { name: 'first' }
  * second.js   // contains -- module.exports = { name: 'second' }
  - third       // directory
    * index.js  // contains -- module.exports = { name: 'third' }
  - more        // directory
    * fourth.js // contains -- module.exports = { name: }
    * fifth.js

I would like to get the following object back when I call require('./mymodules'):

 {
    first: {
        name: 'first'
    },
    second: {
        name: 'second'
    },
    third: {
        name: 'third'
    },
    more: {
        fourth: {
            name: 'fourth'
        },
        fifth: {
            name: 'fifth'
        }
    }
 }

Usage

You should include export-dir as a dependency in your package.json file, you may do so by runnning:

npm install export-dir --save

In order to export an entire directory structure like in the example you need to place an index.js file into the desired directory which contains the following lines:

var exportDir = require('export-dir');
module.exports = exportDir(__dirname);

In the above example you would need to create an index.js file like this in both the ./mymodules directory and in ./mymodules/more in order to get the exported object shown above.

Testing

This project uses the mocha module for testing. This dependencies is only for development and is not needed for use of export-dir. In order to install the development dependencies and run the tests using npm please run:

npm install -d
npm test