While this gist has been shared and followed for years, I regret not giving more background. It was originally a gist for the engineering org I was in, not a "general suggestion" for any React app.
Typically I avoid folders altogether. Heck, I even avoid new files. If I can build an app with one 2000 line file I will. New files and folders are a pain.
But when you're in a decently large organization where different development teams work within pretty well-defined feature boundaries of an application, I like the following approach but I would keep the feature folders flat, no route nesting.
Also, don't you dare throw this at your eng team and be like "this is the way". Make up your own minds and don't use me as some weird appeal to authority, I'm just an average dev like anybody else.
- Clear feature ownership
- Module usage predictibility (refactoring, maintainence, you know what's shared, what's not, prevents accidental regressions, avoids huge directories of not-actually-reusable modules, etc)
- CI runs only the tests that matter (future)
- Code splitting (future)
The file structure maps directly to the route hierarchy, which maps directly to the UI hierarchy.
It's inverted from the model that we've used in other systems. If we consider all folders being either a "generic" or a "feature" folder, we only have one "feature" folder but many "generic" folders.
Examples of "feature" folders:
- Surveys
- Admin
- Users
- Author
Examples of "generic" folders:
- components
- helpers
- stores
- actions
Given this route config:
var routes = (
<Route name="App">
<Route name="Admin">
<Route name="Users"/>
<Route name="Reports"/>
</Route>
<Route name="Course">
<Route name="Assignments"/>
</Route>
</Route>
);We would now set up our directories like this:
app
└── screens
└── App
└── screens
├── Admin
│ └── screens
│ ├── Reports
│ └── Users
└── Course
└── screens
└── Assignments
Next, each of these screens has an index.js file, which is the file
that handles the entry into the screen, also known as a "Route Handler"
in react router. Its very much like a Route in Ember. We'll also have
some top-level application bootstrapping stuff at the root, like
config/routes.js.
app
├── config
│ └── routes.js
├── screens
│ └── App
│ ├── screens
│ │ ├── Admin
│ │ │ ├── screens
│ │ │ │ ├── Reports
│ │ │ │ │ └── index.js
│ │ │ │ └── Users
│ │ │ │ └── index.js
│ │ │ └── index.js
│ │ └── Course
│ │ ├── screens
│ │ │ └── Assignments
│ │ │ └── index.js
│ │ └── index.js
│ └── index.js
└── index.js
With this structure, each screen has its own directory to hold its modules. In other words, we've introduced "scope" into our application file structure.
Each will probably have a components directory.
app
├── config
│ └── routes.js
├── screens
│ └── App
│ ├── components
│ ├── screens
│ │ ├── Admin
│ │ │ ├── components
│ │ │ ├── screens
│ │ │ │ ├── Reports
│ │ │ │ │ ├── components
│ │ │ │ │ └── index.js
│ │ │ │ └── Users
│ │ │ │ ├── components
│ │ │ │ └── index.js
│ │ │ └── index.js
│ │ └── Course
│ │ ├── components
│ │ ├── screens
│ │ │ └── Assignments
│ │ │ ├── components
│ │ │ └── index.js
│ │ └── index.js
│ └── index.js
└── index.js
These components are used only in the current screen, not even the child screens. So what about when you've got some shared components between screens?
Every screen also has a "shared" generic directory. If its children share any components with each other or the parent, we put the shared code in "shared". Here is our growing app with some new shared, and not shared modules.
app
├── config
│ └── routes.js
├── screens
│ └── App
│ ├── components
│ ├── screens
│ │ ├── Admin
│ │ │ ├── components
│ │ │ ├── screens
│ │ │ │ ├── Reports
│ │ │ │ │ ├── components
│ │ │ │ │ ├── stores
│ │ │ │ │ │ └── ReportsStore.js
│ │ │ │ │ └── index.js
│ │ │ │ └── Users
│ │ │ │ ├── components
│ │ │ │ └── index.js
│ │ │ ├── shared
│ │ │ │ └── stores
│ │ │ │ ├── AccountStore.js
│ │ │ │ └── UserStore.js
│ │ │ └── index.js
│ │ └── Course
│ │ ├── components
│ │ ├── screens
│ │ │ └── Assignments
│ │ │ ├── components
│ │ │ └── index.js
│ │ └── index.js
│ ├── shared
│ │ └── components
│ │ ├── Avatar.js
│ │ └── Icon.js
│ └── index.js
├── shared
│ └── util
│ └── createStore.js
└── index.js
Note Admin/shared; Reports and Users can both access the shared
stores. Additionally, every screen in the app can use Avatar.js and Icon.js.
We put shared components in the nearest shared directory possible and
move it toward the root as needed.
The way modules in CommonJS are resolved is pretty straightforward in practice: its all relative from the current file.
There is one piece of "magic" in the way modules resolve. When you do a
non-relative require like require('moment') the resolver will first
try to find it in node_modules/moment. If its not there, it will look
in ../node_modules/moment, and on up the tree until it finds it.
We've made it so that shared resolves the same way with webpack
modulesDirectories. This way you don't have to
require('../../../../../../../../../../shared/Avatar') you can simply
do require('components/Avatar') no matter where you are.
Tests live next to the modules they test. Tests for
shared/util/createStore.js live in shared/util/__tests__/createStore.test.js.
Now our app has a bunch of __tests__ directories:
app
├── __tests__
├── config
│ └── routes.js
├── screens
│ └── App
│ ├── components
│ │ ├── __tests__
│ │ │ └── AppView.test.js
│ │ └── AppView.js
... etc.
├── shared
│ └── util
│ ├── __tests__
│ │ └── createStore.test.js
│ └── createStore.js
└── index.js
The other option is "views", which has become a lot like "controller". What does it even mean? Screen seems pretty intuitive to me to mean "a specific screen in the app" and not something that is shared. It has the added benefit that there's no such thing as an "MSC" yet, so the word "screen" causes people to ask "what's a screen?" instead of assuming they know what a "view" is supposed to be.
Like @sheltonial, we were happy with this structure, particularly how shared components & utilities, plus actions & reducers can be discovered.
However, like @petrometro commented on Dec 16, 2015, the benefit of the structure rather degraded once we started writing tests. While webpack is fine with the shared module resolution, babel doesn't know how to find the action/reducer/component required by the unit under test.
We've had to go back to using ../../../foo whenever a test ran into a problem.
Can anyone suggest a better way around this?
[Placing our modules under node_modules is a non-starter. We use imports rather than requires.]