Node JS Folder Structure

Some best practices in structuring a large node js project folder.

|app.js
|package.json
|--app
|   |--models
|        |--user.js
|        |--user-schema.js
|   |--views
|   |--controllers
|--config
|   |--authentication.js
|   |--credentials.js
|   |--routes
|        |--page_1.js
|        |--page_2.js
|        |--login.js
|        |--signup.js
|   |--database.js
|   `--locale
|        |--en_us.js
|--public
|   |--controllers
|--react
|   |--atoms
|        |--button.jsx
|        |--button.sass
|        |--button-responsive.sass
|   |--molecules
|   |--organisms
|   |--templates
|   |--pages
|--views
|   |--layouts
|   |--pages
|--tests
|   |--users
|   |--admins

• Folder naming can be singular or plural, but should be standardized

Root folders:

• app - holds the whole express code structure
• public - holds the static file. Best if server using a CDN.
• views - contains the static html views

App folder contains the following:

• models - contains the schema for the models and database
• routes - contains the express js routes
• stores - database access layer code
• configs - holds the whole app configuration, including routes endpoints, auth and database config
• helpers - a.k.a. useful utils
• middlewares - the heart of express

API folder will contain the following:

• entity - the request params, including validation
• graph - helper to parse the response
• action - config for the services which contains the method, routes, and commands to be dispatcher
• command - triggered by command to handle a specific requests
• store - database access layer

Deciding factor for the app architecture

• how reusable is it from the scale of 1 to 10?
• how granular should the files be? preferable 150 loc (line of codes) per file
• each file does only one thing best
• reusable codes are extracted out

Client side folder structure

• is separated from the server side
• communicates with the server side through REST calls or websocket

###Folder Structure:

• assets (including images, fonts, etc)
• scripts (we do not choose js owing to the variety of compilers available now such as coffeescript, jsx, etc and thus do not want to be tied to a specific technology)
• stylesheets (css, less, sass files resides here)
• data (static data)