path_provider_ffi 2.1.5-dev2

A Flutter plugin for getting common filesystem paths synchronously using FFI

path_provider_ffi

A port of the path_provider Flutter plugin, designed to find commonly used locations on the filesystem. This package offers several advantages over the original path_provider by using FFI (Foreign Function Interface) to directly access native APIs, offering both performance improvements and, more significantly, removing the need to use await.

Supports Android, iOS, Linux, macOS and Windows. This port uses FFI to access the native APIs instead of the platform channels used by the original plugin.

Not all methods are supported on all platforms.

	Android	iOS	Linux	macOS	Windows
Support	SDK 21+	12.0+	Any	10.14+	Windows 10+

Disclaimer

This package depends on many experimental packages provided by the Dart Labs Team. The objective_c package is used to interact with Objective-C APIs on iOS and macOS. ffigen and jnigen are also experimental packages, however these are only used to generate the bindings for the native libraries.

This package contains all the tests from the original path_provider plugin and is also tested against the original plugin to ensure that the results are the same.

Example

final Directory tempDir = getTemporaryDirectory();

final Directory appDocumentsDir = getApplicationDocumentsDirectory();

final Directory? downloadsDir = getDownloadsDirectory();

Supported platforms and paths

Directories support by platform:

Directory	Android	iOS	Linux	macOS	Windows
Temporary	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️
Application Support	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️
Application Library	❌️	✔️	❌️	✔️	❌️
Application Documents	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️
Application Cache	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️
External Storage	✔️	❌	❌	❌️	❌️
External Cache Directories	✔️	❌	❌	❌️	❌️
External Storage Directories	✔️	❌	❌	❌️	❌️
Downloads	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️

Testing

path_provider_ffi uses the same tests as the original path_provider plugin as well as comparison tests to ensure that the results are the same. The tests are run on all platforms using the flutter_test package.

Tests are ran on RunsOn, an awesome open source github runner alternative.