Nick Janetakis

Posted on Jul 10, 2018

How do you organize source code on your computer?

#discuss #productivity #beginners

I'd be curious to see how everyone organizes their source code.

Let's see some screenshots or terminal dumps of your set up.

Here's what I've been doing for the last 5 or 6 years:

I like to organize my code by what it's used for rather than by language.

I've been a freelance developer for about 20 years and inside of those folders are hundreds of projects ranging from Visual Basic 6 from the mid 1990s to more recent projects written in Flask, Rails and Phoenix.

Top comments (32)

Sung M. Kim • Jul 10 '18 • Edited

Below is how my sources are organized (for personal codes)

public sources - GitHub
private source - GitLab
Playground - throwaway

(Please ignore the poo.💩 file.)

GitHub has another top level directories, "Docker", "Aspnet", etc by technology.

I don't differentiate much by languages though.
I've been using above set up last 3 years and been working great.

throwaway is where all my one-offs or test/useless code are located.

I have a different structure for work as I have to follow the conventions at work.

Casey Brooks • Jul 10 '18 • Edited

I had no idea you could use emojis in filenames.

var mind = "blown";

Sung M. Kim • Jul 10 '18

You can also search by emojis 😎.

Guney Ozsan • Jul 12 '18

This looks pretty crazy. Just learnt as well.

🃏 • Aug 29 '18

oh man this emoji discovery is pretty friggin awesome, such wow

Eljay-Adobe • Jul 11 '18

Apparently POO is an OOP language.

Shreya Dahal • Jul 11 '18 • Edited

Day job:
~/Projects/CompanyName/ProjectName
Personal serious side projects or regular open-source contribution:
~/Projects/Personal/ProjectName
Practice non-serious side projects:
~/Projects/Practice/TechnologyName/ProjectName
Some open-source apps/scripts that I use and tinker with or have to self-host:
~/Projects/Applications/ProjectName
One-off scripts and POCs:
~/Projects/tmp

Avalander • Jul 12 '18

~/Projects
    |- archived
    |- ongoing
    |- tutorials

ongoing is where I have the projects that I'm currently (or I've reasonably recently been) working on.

archived is where I move my projects after I abandon them. I try to be honest with myself and move projects from ongoing to here when I haven't worked on them in a few weeks and it's unlikely that I will take them up in the next few days. Also, sometimes I move projects from archived to ongoing if I decide to resurrect them.

tutorials is where I store the code I write following tutorials. I have a special consideration for those because usually when I'm learning something new and I follow a tutorial, I create a project with all the examples and stuff, that is handy to review when I'm working on a project with that stuff.

ItsASine (Kayla) • Jul 10 '18

~/dev is where I dump everything since that's an easy path to cd to.

I should probably care more than this, but it works for now.

Joerg Hochwald 🇪🇺 • Jul 11 '18

Exactly what I do. I let GIT handle everything for me.
The only exception: In dev is a directory called Clones, and as the name tells: I Dump all the cloned public repositories in here.

Daniele Scasciafratte • Jul 10 '18

I have a Prog folder where there are all my repos localy that are mainly scripts or stuff that later I move on /var/www where I have the webserver or my vagrant machines.
Compared to you I am a bit disorganized.

For contracts and courses I use folders on external drives just to be sure that they are backup with my Nextcloud instance.

Nick Janetakis • Jul 10 '18

Keep in mind, I didn't start out like this.

The legacy folder alone as of today has 102 projects. That directory structure was slowly built up over many years.

Daniele Scasciafratte • Jul 10 '18

Say in that way seems very scary!

Nelson Estevão • Jul 12 '18

I like the idea of having everything on my home.

(~ is where ❤️ is)

Any kind of ~/Developer or ~/Projects would be a good fit for me. However, in the last year I settle on ~/Code. And since then I store all my repos on that folder. And I try to keep only projects that I am working on. I use GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket for store all of them remotely.

I have three exceptions though. First, my dotfiles repo is at ~/.dotfiles. Second, a spells repo is at .spells which contains some shell scripts.

The third exception is anything that I might use for learning purposes. I store those at ~/Desktop.

Quentin Sonrel • Jul 11 '18

Most of my projects are in a ~/Projects dir. I have a bunch of shell scripts in an another dir that does not make much sense (~/Other/Scripts)... I should move this dir but it has been there for years so... it's tradition now I guess 😀

I try to keep my ~/Projects dir tidy by removing any project that I'm not actively working on, since most of them are either on GitHub or my Gitea instance anyway.

Ben Sinclair • Sep 18 '18

I'd like to say I'm organised but I'm actually quite scrappy. I'll go so far as to make a directory called work or something, but that's about it.

One thing you do I don't understand is have a directory called github. I wouldn't do that unless I was working on the code for github :) Other than that, everything I do is version controlled and I don't care what company provides remotes for it.