Crash dump files littering home directory

[Terrance]

Operating system

Windows

Joplin version

3.1.24

Desktop version info

Joplin 3.1.24 (prod, win32)

Client ID: 2ca5a676b7954ae89721faa06464e5e6
Sync Version: 3
Profile Version: 47
Keychain Supported: Yes

Revision: d581264

Backup: 1.4.2
Get Notebook ID: 1.0.1
Joplin Note Attachement rename: 1.2.2
Outline: 1.5.13

Current behaviour

#9941 tracks a repeated crash which produces a joplin_crash_dump_*.json file on most shutdowns. As that's logged already and pending a fix, there's no immediate action to take with these crash files. They are however piling up in my home directory, which isn't an appropriate place to be dumping log files (particularly when they're not even in a subfolder).

Expected behaviour

Crash dump files to be placed in a suitable place, out of the way but still accessible when needed (for example, %APPDATA%\Joplin on Windows).

Nice to have: make this a user-configurable location, or allow turning off their generation in the first place.

Logs

No response

[personalizedrefrigerator]

I'm also experiencing this on Fedora 41.

For reference, I think that this is the line that's causing the problem:

joplin/packages/app-desktop/bridge.ts

Line 110 in 0c40595

writeFileSync(`${homedir()}/joplin_crash_dump_${date}.json`, JSON.stringify(errorEventWithLog, null, '\t'), 'utf-8');

[Terrance]

Without much in the way of non-browser JS experience, and with just some initial searches of the code for other precedents, I would suggest something like:

import { mkdirSync } from 'fs';
import { env } from 'process';
import * as utils from '.../utils.js';

let target = 'crash-dumps';
if (utils.isWindows()) {
    target = (env.LOCALAPPDATA || `${homedir()}\\AppData\\Local`) + `\\Joplin\\${target}`;
} else if (utils.isMac()) {
    target = `${homedir()}/Library/Preferences/Joplin/${target}`;
} else { // UNIX or unknown
    target = (env.XDG_CACHE_HOME || `${homedir()}/.cache`) + `/joplin/${target}`;
}
mkdirSync(target, {recursive: true});
writeFileSync(`${target}/joplin_crash_dump_${date}.json`, JSON.stringify(errorEventWithLog, null, '\t'), 'utf-8');

Which should result in:

• Windows: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Joplin\crash-dumps
• Mac: /Users/<username>/Library/Preferences/Joplin/crash-dumps
  (This is a guess as I've never used Mac myself; there may be a more appropriate path for this.)
• Linux etc.: /home/<username>/.cache/joplin/crash-dumps

I'm not sure if Android comes through here, and if so then how the path is formed either currently or for an equivalent to the above (I'd suggest <external storage>/Android/data/<app ID>/crash-dumps).

Of course if we have helpers somewhere for working with an app data location then it should probably use those! That said, I have deliberately used local app data (as opposed to roaming) on Windows, and the standard cache location (as opposed to user data) for Linux, which existing helpers are probably not using for the rest of user data.