How can I get the path to the %APPDATA% directory in Python?

Question

How can I get the path to the %APPDATA% directory in Python?

score 137 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 01 '12 at 19:52

137

import os
print os.getenv('APPDATA')

answered Nov 01 '12 at 19:52

Jon Clements

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Note that this returns `AppData\Roaming`. You need `%LOCALAPPDATA%` if you are looking for `AppData\Local`. – Baris Demiray Sep 27 '16 at 16:42
If you are looking for `AppData\LocalLow` you need to use `..\LocalLow` as there is no environment variable as far as I can find. – AnnanFay Oct 19 '19 at 12:30

score 31 · Answer 2 · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

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You may use os.path.expandvars(path):

Return the argument with environment variables expanded. Substrings of the form $name or ${name} are replaced by the value of environment variable name. Malformed variable names and references to non-existing variables are left unchanged.

On Windows, %name% expansions are supported in addition to $name and ${name}.

This comes handy when combining the expanded value with other path components.

Example:

from os import path

sendto_dir = path.expandvars(r'%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo')
dumps_dir = path.expandvars(r'%LOCALAPPDATA%\CrashDumps')

edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

Community

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answered Sep 27 '18 at 10:01

Adrian W

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These days `pathlib` is often more convenient, but, unfortunately it [does not implement expandvars()](https://bugs.python.org/issue21301), although it *does* implement [expanduser()](https://docs.python.org/3.10/library/pathlib.html#pathlib.Path.expanduser). – djvg Nov 19 '21 at 13:01

score 13 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 12 '21 at 10:15

Although the question clearly asks about the Windows-specific %APPDATA% directory, perhaps you have ended up here looking for a cross-platform solution for getting the application data directory for the current user, which varies by OS.

As of Python 3.10, somewhat surprisingly, there is no built-in function to find this directory. However, there are third-party packages, the most popular of which seems to be appdirs, which provides functions to retrieve paths such as:

user data dir (user_data_dir)
user config dir (user_config_dir)
user cache dir (user_cache_dir)
site data dir (site_data_dir)
site config dir (site_config_dir)
user log dir (user_log_dir)

score 1 · Answer 4 · edited Dec 02 '17 at 19:43

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You can try doing:

import os
path = os.getenv('APPDATA')
array = os.listdir(path)
print array

edited Dec 02 '17 at 19:43

sotoz

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answered Dec 02 '17 at 18:40

Aominé

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This is essentially the same as the accepted answer given five years before. OP asked how to get the path, not how to enumerate the contents of a directory. – Adrian W Sep 27 '18 at 08:45

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Dec 19 '21 at 12:53

You can use module called appdata. It was developed to get access to different paths for your application, including app data folder. Install it:

pip install appdata

And after that you can use it this way:

from appdata import AppDataPaths
app_paths = AppDataPaths()
app_paths.app_data_path  # for your app data path
app_paths.logs_path  # for logs folder path for your application

It allows to to get not only app data folder and logs folder but has other features to manage paths like managing config files paths. And it's customizable.

Links:

Read the Docs - documentation.
GitHub - source code.
PyPI - package manager (pip).

How can I get the path to the %APPDATA% directory in Python?

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