steam-shortcut-editor

npm i steam-shortcut-editor

Edit Steam Shortcuts using Node.js

Read/Write Steam shortcuts.vdf file. This file is found in $SteamDirectory/userdata/$SteamUserId/config.

After modifying the file, Steam will need to be restarted. If you modify the file, then add a Non-Steam Game using the Steam UI, it will overwrite the file. If the file is not formatted correctly after Steam restarts, it will delete the file. Be sure to backup the file before messing with it.

This has only been tested on Windows 7, so the string representation of shortcuts.vdf might vary by platform.

Sample Program

To run the sample.js file, the environment variable STEAM_USER_ID should be defined to the Steam id used in the file path to the shortcuts.vdf file. The sample.js will read in shortcuts.vdf, dump the JSON representation to the console, then rewrite the file into shortcuts_write.vdf file. Before writing the file, the re-created string representation is compared against the original file to ensure the parsing/writing is working correctly.

If not on Windows (or your Steam directory isn't C:/Program Files (x86)/Steam) you can set the Steam directory by setting the environment variable STEAM_DIRECTORY.

Data Contract - Shortcut Object

To add new shortcuts, stringify an array of objects that look like:

{
  "AppName": "Some Name",
  "exe": "\"C:\\path\\to\\exe\"",
  "StartDir": "\"C:\\pate\\to\\dir\\\"",
  "icon": "",
  "ShortcutPath": "",
  "hidden": false,
  "tags": [
    "favorite"
  ]
}

• AppName: Name shown in Steam
• exe: Path to exe file to run. Should be within quotes.
• StartDir: Path to directory to run the exe file within. Should be within quotes. Typically, should be directory containing exe file.
• icon: Path to icon file. If left blank, will use the icon for the exe file.
• ShortcutPath: Not sure what this is used for, I have only ever seen it left blank.
• hidden: Should be boolean value. Sometimes Steam puts seemingly random characters (like ) and g) as the value, but boolean values should work as expected.
• tags: Array of tags. If no tags are desired, it should be an empty array.

Usage

npm i steam-shortcut-editor

var shortcut = require('steam-shortcut-editor');

var fs = require('fs');


var filePath = 'full/path/to/shortcuts.vdf';
var writePath = filePath.replace('shortcuts','shortcuts_write');

fs.readFile(filePath, {encoding:'utf8'}, function(err,data){

    if(err){
        console.log('failed to read '+filePath);
        return;
    }

    var dataObj = shortcut.parse(data);

    console.log(JSON.stringify(dataObj,null,2));

    var dataStr = shortcut.stringify(dataObj);

    //sanity check
    shortcut.util.compareData(data,dataStr);

    fs.writeFile(writePath,dataStr, function(err){
        if(err){
            console.log('failed to write '+writePath);
        }
    });


});

Parsing is handled by lib/parser.js. Read the file using fs.readFile, specify the encoding to utf8, then give the string value to the parser to get a JSON blob.

Writing is handled by lib/writer.js. Give it an array of the above Shortcut objects and it will return a string representation, that can be written to a file using fs.writeFile.