Angular Project Structure
When building a well-organized Angular project, creating a clear structure for your codebase is crucial for both individual productivity and team collaboration. Proper folder organization not only makes it easier to navigate your project but also enhances maintainability and scalability as it grows. Here, we’ll explore an efficient way to structure an Angular project into distinct folders that each serve specific purposes:
Core Folder: Foundational Elements
The Core folder is reserved for items that represent the foundational aspects of your application. These include:
- Constants: These are fixed values that are used throughout the application. By centralizing them, you can easily adjust configuration values as needed.
- Enums: Using enumerations makes code easier to understand and maintain. They can be useful for representing a set of related values, like status codes or user roles.
- Factories: This includes functions or classes used for creating instances of models, especially when additional configuration or logic is needed beyond a simple class instantiation.
- Models: These define the shape of the data being used in your application. They serve as the blueprint for objects, ensuring consistency across different services and components.
Pages Folder: Organizing Main Components
The Pages folder is for your main page components, which represent different routes in your application. This folder follows a feature-first approach, meaning each feature or page is self-contained. The folder structure should mirror your application’s navigation, providing a clean mapping between URLs and components.
Each page folder contains the following:
- Components: These are the Angular components specific to the page or feature. They manage the user interface and interactions related to that particular feature.
- Handler Services: These services handle the business logic that is specific to the page. By keeping the handler service within the page folder, the logic remains encapsulated, making it easier to maintain and test.
- Resolvers: Resolvers fetch the necessary data before the route is activated. Keeping them close to the related components ensures that the data handling logic is tightly coupled with the feature that needs it.
- Models: Models specific to a feature should also be placed within the page folder. This makes the feature self-contained, allowing you to easily see all the data structures that are relevant to that feature.
By having each page’s components, styles, services, resolvers, and related models encapsulated together, your project becomes more modular and easier to understand. This feature-first structure promotes better organization and helps keep each feature’s logic isolated, which improves both maintainability and scalability.
Shared Folder: Reusable Elements and Services
The Shared folder contains elements that are used across multiple components and pages in your application:
- Services: These include all reusable services that are used across the application. The services folder can be further organized into subfolders:
- HTTP Services: Services that interact with APIs, centralizing HTTP requests for consistency.
- Utility Services: General-purpose services like authentication or logging that are shared across the app.
- Wrapper Services: Services that encapsulate complex logic, such as date manipulation, to provide reusable methods for common operations.
- Components: More complex components that are used repeatedly, such as table-action components or headers that provide user interaction across different pages.
- Interactions: Simple interaction components that are used in different parts of the application, such as buttons, tables, select inputs, or date selectors. By isolating them here, you ensure consistency and make future modifications easier.
- Pipes: Pipes are used to transform data in your templates. By placing them in the shared folder, you make it simple to reuse them across multiple components, ensuring consistency in data presentation throughout the application.
- Guards: Guards are used to control access to routes, ensuring that only authorized users can view certain pages. This makes your application more secure and easier to maintain. General use guards should be added here while more specific guards should be place within the specific page folders.
Keeping Spec Files Close to Components
Keeping spec files close to the component they are testing is a best practice that enhances maintainability. By having the .spec.ts files alongside their corresponding components, developers can easily locate, modify, or create tests as they work on specific features. This proximity helps ensure that unit testing is a natural part of the development workflow, encouraging thorough testing and reducing the likelihood of neglected test files.
Summary
Organizing your Angular project into these distinct folders ensures that your codebase is modular, maintainable, and easy to navigate. This structure allows different team members to easily find, modify, or add to the project without introducing confusion or redundancy.
- Core: Foundational elements that represent the building blocks of the application.
- Pages: Main components, including their services, resolvers, and models, that correspond to the application routes.
- Shared: Reusable components, services, interactions, pipes, and guards that are used throughout the project.
By following this structure, you can maintain a scalable and efficient Angular project, where each piece of functionality has a clear place, making it easier for developers to understand and extend.
Example Folder Structure
app/
├── core/
│ ├── constants/
│ ├── enums/
│ ├── factories/
│ └── models/
├── pages/
│ ├── home/
│ │ ├── components/
│ │ │ ├── home.component.html
│ │ │ ├── home.component.scss
│ │ │ ├── home.component.spec.ts
│ │ │ ├── home.component.ts
│ │ │ └── home.module.ts
│ │ ├── services/
│ │ │ └── home.handler.service.ts
│ │ ├── resolvers/
│ │ │ └── home.resolver.ts
│ │ └── models/
│ │ └── home.model.ts
│ ├── reporting/
│ │ └── transactions/
│ │ ├── components/
│ │ │ ├── transactions.component.html
│ │ │ ├── transactions.component.scss
│ │ │ ├── transactions.component.spec.ts
│ │ │ ├── transactions.component.ts
│ │ │ └── transactions.module.ts
│ │ ├── services/
│ │ │ └── transactions.handler.service.ts
│ │ ├── resolvers/
│ │ │ └── transactions.resolver.ts
│ │ └── models/
│ │ └── transactions.model.ts
│ ├── misc/
│ │ └── not-found/
│ │ ├── components/
│ │ │ ├── not-found.component.html
│ │ │ ├── not-found.component.scss
│ │ │ ├── not-found.component.spec.ts
│ │ │ ├── not-found.component.ts
│ │ │ └── not-found.module.ts
├── shared/
│ ├── services/
│ │ ├── http/
│ │ │ └── api.service.ts
│ │ ├── utility/
│ │ │ ├── auth.service.ts
│ │ │ └── logging.service.ts
│ │ └── wrappers/
│ │ └── date-wrapper.service.ts
│ ├── components/
│ │ └── table-actions/
│ │ ├── table-actions.component.html
│ │ ├── table-actions.component.scss
│ │ ├── table-actions.component.spec.ts
│ │ ├── table-actions.component.ts
│ │ └── table-actions.module.ts
│ ├── interactions/
│ │ └── button/
│ │ ├── button-icon/
│ │ │ ├── button-icon.component.html
│ │ │ ├── button-icon.component.scss
│ │ │ ├── button-icon.component.spec.ts
│ │ │ ├── button-icon.component.ts
│ │ │ └── button-icon.module.ts
│ │ ├── button-tile/
│ │ │ ├── button-tile.component.html
│ │ │ ├── button-tile.component.scss
│ │ │ ├── button-tile.component.spec.ts
│ │ │ ├── button-tile.component.ts
│ │ │ └── button-tile.module.ts
│ ├── pipes/
│ │ └── date-format.pipe.ts
│ ├── guards/
│ │ └── auth.guard.ts
When a Clear Structure May Not Be Suitable
In some cases, implementing a highly organized folder structure may introduce unnecessary complexity. For small projects or quick prototypes, a detailed folder structure can add unnecessary overhead. A simpler structure may be more efficient for quick development and iteration.
Read Also
Consider adding index.ts files to improve your Angular project structure by simplifying and managing imports.