App base path from a module in NodeJS

The approach of using __dirname is the most reliable one. It will always give you correct directory. You do not have to worry about ../../ in Windows environment as path.join() will take care of that.

There is an alternative solution though. You can use process.cwd() which returns the current working directory of the process. That command works fine if you execute your node application from the base application directory. However, if you execute your node application from different directory, say, its parent directory (e.g. node yourapp\index.js) then __dirname mechanism will work much better.

I hope that will help.

You can define a global variable like in your app.js:

global.__basedir = __dirname;

Then you can use this global variable anywhere. Like that:

var base_path = __basedir