Skip to main content

File System

LangChain provides tools for interacting with a local file system out of the box. This notebook walks through some of them.

Note: these tools are not recommended for use outside a sandboxed environment!

%pip install -qU langchain-community

First, we'll import the tools.

from tempfile import TemporaryDirectory

from langchain_community.agent_toolkits import FileManagementToolkit

# We'll make a temporary directory to avoid clutter
working_directory = TemporaryDirectory()
API Reference:FileManagementToolkit

The FileManagementToolkit​

If you want to provide all the file tooling to your agent, it's easy to do so with the toolkit. We'll pass the temporary directory in as a root directory as a workspace for the LLM.

It's recommended to always pass in a root directory, since without one, it's easy for the LLM to pollute the working directory, and without one, there isn't any validation against straightforward prompt injection.

toolkit = FileManagementToolkit(
    root_dir=str(working_directory.name)
)  # If you don't provide a root_dir, operations will default to the current working directory
toolkit.get_tools()
[CopyFileTool(root_dir='/tmp/tmprdvsw3tg'),
 DeleteFileTool(root_dir='/tmp/tmprdvsw3tg'),
 FileSearchTool(root_dir='/tmp/tmprdvsw3tg'),
 MoveFileTool(root_dir='/tmp/tmprdvsw3tg'),
 ReadFileTool(root_dir='/tmp/tmprdvsw3tg'),
 WriteFileTool(root_dir='/tmp/tmprdvsw3tg'),
 ListDirectoryTool(root_dir='/tmp/tmprdvsw3tg')]

Selecting File System Tools​

If you only want to select certain tools, you can pass them in as arguments when initializing the toolkit, or you can individually initialize the desired tools.

tools = FileManagementToolkit(
    root_dir=str(working_directory.name),
    selected_tools=["read_file", "write_file", "list_directory"],
).get_tools()
tools
[ReadFileTool(root_dir='/tmp/tmprdvsw3tg'),
 WriteFileTool(root_dir='/tmp/tmprdvsw3tg'),
 ListDirectoryTool(root_dir='/tmp/tmprdvsw3tg')]
read_tool, write_tool, list_tool = tools
write_tool.invoke({"file_path": "example.txt", "text": "Hello World!"})
'File written successfully to example.txt.'
# List files in the working directory
list_tool.invoke({})
'example.txt'

Was this page helpful?