2022-01-10
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Geshan Manandhar
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Jan 10, 2022 ⋅ 4 min read

Organizing your Express.js project structure for better productivity

Geshan Manandhar Geshan is a seasoned software engineer with more than a decade of software engineering experience. He has a keen interest in REST architecture, microservices, and cloud computing. He also blogs at geshan.com.np.

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8 Replies to "Organizing your Express.js project structure for better productivity"

  1. This folder structure is only suitable for small projects. It is good to me tion that component based decomposition works better for larger applications.

    1. Exactly, I don’t understand why they keep promoting this structure, it seems that it was just a copy of another post.
      This may seem appealing for small projects, when they grow, it becomes very difficult to maintain a feature that has files scattered in random places in the project. ( since not all functionality will have Repository, service etc ).

      He is a good discussion about it: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/338597/folder-by-type-or-folder-by-feature

  2. What would be the difference between `services` and `controllers` ? How do you decide which logic you want to place in what folder ?

    1. Putting big piece of code inside controller may be not the best idea when you need to manage a lot of them. Also the logic can be reusable. So exporting that logic into functions may work for larger projects. You can store that functions inside services. I’m not sure if this is what author meant, but after working on couple projects – it’s quite common solution.

    2. Service layers would contain any to most of the business logic. Controllers on the other hand are meant to only handle requests from and to the view (or presentation layer), and to handle model retrieval from and to the service layer. Thinking on an MVC design. I suggest you to take my comment and prompt it to an AI for further description.

  3. Controllers here are written as bare functions,
    How could we apply different middlewares to each controllers depending on need?

    This is useful when validating data fields that are only present in some of the controllers. Otherwise, we would need to explicitly declare an error return statement, which is prone to error.

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