What is the best way to get an empty temporary directory in Ruby on Rails?

Question

What is the best way to get a temporary directory with nothing in it using Ruby on Rails? I need the API to be cross-platform compatible. The stdlib tmpdir won\'t work.

Answer 1

A general aprox I'm using now:

def in_tmpdir
  path = File.expand_path "#{Dir.tmpdir}/#{Time.now.to_i}#{rand(1000)}/"
  FileUtils.mkdir_p path
  yield path
ensure
  FileUtils.rm_rf( path ) if File.exists?( path )
end

So in your code you can:

in_tmpdir do |tmpdir|
  puts "My tmp dir: #{tmpdir}"
  # work with files in the dir
end

The temporary dir will be removed automatically when your method will finish.