Temporary directory management for Rust

tempdir

A Rust library for creating a temporary directory and deleting its entire contents when the directory is dropped.

Documentation

Deprecation Note

The tempdir crate is being merged into tempfile and is available in 3.x. Please direct new issues and pull requests to tempfile.

Usage

Add this to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
tempdir = "0.3"

and this to your crate root:

extern crate tempdir;

Example

This sample method does the following:

1. Create a temporary directory in the default location with the given prefix.
2. Determine a file path in the directory and print it out.
3. Create a file inside the temp folder.
4. Write to the file and sync it to disk.
5. Close the directory, deleting the contents in the process.

use std::io::{self, Write};
use std::fs::File;
use tempdir::TempDir;

fn write_temp_folder_with_files() -> io::Result<()> {
    let dir = TempDir::new("my_directory_prefix")?;
    let file_path = dir.path().join("foo.txt");
    println!("{:?}", file_path);

    let mut f = File::create(file_path)?;
    f.write_all(b"Hello, world!")?;
    f.sync_all()?;
    dir.close()?;

    Ok(())
}

Note: Closing the directory is actually optional, as it would be done on drop. The benefit of closing here is that it allows possible errors to be handled.