How to Properly Organize Files in Your Codebase & Avoid Mayhem

The main library, data, UI, docs and wiki, tests, legacy and third-party components … How do we keep track and maintain order within all of this? Organizing the files in your codebase can become a daunting task.

Relax — we've got this! In this article, we’ll review the most common systems for both small and large projects, with some easy-to-follow best practices.

Why Bother?

As with pretty much all of the tasks related to project management — documentation, software commits, deployment — you’ll benefit from taking a conscious, programmatic approach. Not only it will reduce problems now, but it will also save you and your team quality time in the future when you need to quickly access and review things.

You surely can recall function names from the top of your head for whatever is it that you're coding right now, and quickly find a file you need to edit, and sharply tell what works from what doesn't — or so you think. But could you say the same about that project you were working on last year?

Let's admit it: software projects can go on spans of inactivity that last for months, and even years. A simple README file could do a lot for your colleagues or your future self. But let's think about the other ways you could structure your project, and establish some basic rules to name files, address project documentation, and to some degree organize an effective workflow that would stand the test of time.

Making Sense of Things

We’ll establish a "baseline" for organizing files in a project — a logic that will serve us for a number of situations within the scope of software development.

As with our rules for committing changes to your codebase the right way, none of this is carved in stone, and for what it's worth, you and your team might come up with different guidelines. In any case, consistency is the name of the game. Be sure you understand (and discuss or dispute) what the rules are, and follow them once you've reached a consensus.

The Mandatory Set

This is a reference list of files that nearly every software project should have:

• README: this is what GitHub renders for you right under the sourcetree, and it can go a long way to explaining what the project is about, how files are organized, and where to find further information.
• CHANGELOG: to list what's new, modified or discontinued on every version or revision — normally in a reverse chronological order for convenience (last changes first).
• COPYING LICENSE: a file containing the full text of the license covering the software, including some additional copyright information, if necessary (such as third-party licenses).
• .gitignore: assuming you use Git (you most probably do), this will also be a must to tell what files not to sync with the repository. (See Jump Start Git's primer on .gitignore and the documentation for more info, and have a look at a collection of useful .gitignore templates for some ideas.)

Supporting Actors

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