AngularJS Folder Structure

How do you layout a folder structure for a large and scaleable AngularJS application?

Sort By Type

On the left we have the app organized by type. Not too bad for smaller apps, but even here you can start to see it gets more difficult to find what you are looking for. When I want to find a specific view and its controller, they are in different folders. It can be good to start here if you are not sure how else to organize the code as it is quite easy to shift to the technique on the right: structure by feature.

Sort By Feature (preferred)

On the right the project is organized by feature. All of the layout views and controllers go in the layout folder, the admin content goes in the admin folder, and the services that are used by all of the areas go in the services folder. The idea here is that when you are looking for the code that makes a feature work, it is located in one place. Services are a bit different as they “service” many features. I like this once my app starts to take shape as it becomes a lot easier to manage for me.

A well written blog post: http://www.johnpapa.net/angular-growth-structure/

Example App: https://github.com/angular-app/angular-app

After building a few applications, some in Symfony-PHP, some .NET MVC, some ROR, i've found that the best way for me is to use Yeoman.io with the AngularJS generator.

That's the most popular and common structure and best maintained.

And most importantly, by keeping that structure, it helps you separate your client side code and to make it agnostic to the server-side technology (all kinds of different folder structures and different server-side templating engines).

That way you can easily duplicate and reuse yours and others code.

Here it is before grunt build: (but use the yeoman generator, don't just create it!)

/app
    /scripts
            /controllers
            /directives
            /services
            /filters
            app.js
    /views
    /styles
    /img
    /bower_components
    index.html
bower.json

And after grunt build (concat, uglify, rev, etc...):

    /scripts
        scripts.min.js (all JS concatenated, minified and grunt-rev)
        vendor.min.js  (all bower components concatenated, minified and grunt-rev)
    /views
    /styles
        mergedAndMinified.css  (grunt-cssmin)
    /images
    index.html  (grunt-htmlmin)

I like this entry about angularjs structure

It's written by one of the angularjs developers, so should give you a good insight

Here's an excerpt:

root-app-folder
├── index.html
├── scripts
│   ├── controllers
│   │   └── main.js
│   │   └── ...
│   ├── directives
│   │   └── myDirective.js
│   │   └── ...
│   ├── filters
│   │   └── myFilter.js
│   │   └── ...
│   ├── services
│   │   └── myService.js
│   │   └── ...
│   ├── vendor
│   │   ├── angular.js
│   │   ├── angular.min.js
│   │   ├── es5-shim.min.js
│   │   └── json3.min.js
│   └── app.js
├── styles
│   └── ...
└── views
    ├── main.html
    └── ...

There is also the approach of organizing the folders not by the structure of the framework, but by the structure of the application's function. There is a github starter Angular/Express application that illustrates this called angular-app.

I'm on my third angularjs app and the folder structure has improved every time so far. I keep mine simple right now.

index.html (or .php)
/resources
  /css
  /fonts
  /images
  /js
    /controllers
    /directives
    /filters
    /services
  /partials (views)

I find that good for single apps. I haven't really had a project yet where I'd need multiple.