These 2 are commonly used to mean pretty different things in node.

process.cwd() is a function that is evaluated to the working directory of the process, by default this is the directory where the process was called from (where “node index.js” was called), but can be updated during the program’s lifecycle with process.chdir. __dirname on the other hand is used to refer to the path of the module the code calling __dirname itself, is located on the system scope of process. So basically, use process.cwd() to get the directory that the process started, and __dirname to get the directory the module you’re writing in.

imagine the following directory structure

<base>/
index.js
src/module0.js

src/module0.js

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2

console.log(process.cwd())
console.log(__dirname);

index.js

1

require('./src/module0')

this will print <base> and then <base>/src as absolute paths, because module0 exists inside of /src it will be returned as the __dirname