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  3. Node.js — Determine the Current Operating System

Node.js — Determine the Current Operating System

In some situations, you may want to detect the underlying operating system of your application. This may happen if you’re using a feature switch or limited feature support on a given platform. For example, you may allow special characters on Unix-based systems and not on Windows.

This tutorial shows you how to detect the current operating system using Node.js.

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Detect Operating System in Node.js

Node.js comes with the built-in os module providing methods related to the operating system. You can retrieve the current operating system identifier for which the Node.js binary was compiled using the os.platform() method.

Here’s how you detect the current operating system using Node.js:

import os from 'node:os'

/**
 * Returns the operating system identifier for which the Node.js binary was compiled.
 *
 * @returns {string}
 */
function os() {  
  return os.platform()
}

The following values are supported at the time of writing this tutorial:
- aix - android - darwin (macOS) - freebsd - linux - openbsd - sunos - win32 (Windows)

The returned value from os.platform() is identical to process.platform. The global Node.js process variable could be a shortcut if you don’t want to import the os module:

// provides the identical value as `os.platform()`
const os = process.platform

We prefer the explicit os.platform() over process.platform. Please decide the way you like best.

That’s it!

Mentioned Resources

Marcus Pöhls

Marcus is a fullstack JS developer. He’s passionate about the hapi framework for Node.js and loves to build web apps and APIs. Creator of Futureflix and the “learn hapi” learning path.

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