DEV Community

Cover image for How do you keep development projects on your PC organized?
Nočnica Mellifera for Heroku

Posted on

How do you keep development projects on your PC organized?

Keeping development projects organized can be a difficult task when you have a lot of them, what methods do you employ to keep yours organized on your computer?

Top comments (19)

Collapse
 
euantorano profile image
Euan T • Edited

I have a Development folder in my home directory, which then has subfolders by language/framework. For example:

/Users/euantorano/Development
├── dlang
│   └── phobos
├── nim
│   ├── Nim
│   ├── pledge.nim
│   ├── recaptcha.nim
│   ├── serial.nim
│   ├── Nim.sublime-project
│   ├── Nim.sublime-workspace
│   ├── serial.nim.sublime-project
│   └── serial.nim.sublime-workspace
└── zig
    ├── docker-zig
    ├── ini
    ├── stomp
    ├── zig-chocolatey-package
    ├── docker-zig.sublime-project
    ├── docker-zig.sublime-workspace
    ├── ini.sublime-project
    ├── ini.sublime-workspace
    ├── stomp.sublime-project
    ├── stomp.sublime-workspace
    ├── zig-chocolatey-package.sublime-project
    └── zig-chocolatey-package.sublime-workspace
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

I primarily use a Mac these days, and also make use of Finder's tags to categorise projects based on language and such.

PS: Not sure what's going on with the formatting of the above code block...

Collapse
 
insanenaman profile image
Naman Gupta • Edited

I love to sort my personal projects on the basis of technology. So, mostly I create a folder like react and under that will create two folders namely projects and temp. Projects will hold my react projects and temp will hold all sorts of temporary code like may be react tutorial follow up and things like that.

Collapse
 
christianmoliveira profile image
Christian Menezes

I separated two directories in "Documents" (I use Windows OS), one of them I put personal projects and in the other one I put clients projects. It's not an impressive organization, but works well for me

Collapse
 
hi_artem profile image
Artem

I am on MacOS, and doing exactly the same thing separating work and personal projects!
I also move older/unused projects into archive, and clean the archive overtime. All the stuff I really care about is version controlled, so the overall organization works really well for me.

Collapse
 
andreandyp profile image
André Michel Andy

All my personal projects are located on a folder named "GitHub" on the Desktop folder of my Laptop. It's an old practice from the old times when I started to use Git and GitHub. Maybe I will use another structure because I haven't opened some of those projects in a long time 😅

My company gave me a MacBook for home office, so all my job projects are there. I store them on Documents folder.

Collapse
 
imthedeveloper profile image
ImTheDeveloper

Personally I get everything pushed into gitlab right away so I can then prune back what I have on my actual local device.

I'll pull down anything I want to work on again but I've learnt the hard way the disaster of not keeping things pushed to a remote location.

Collapse
 
jcolag profile image
John Colagioia (he/him)

I have two pieces. The obvious part is that I just have a code folder that I clone everything into. But since that becomes cluttered quickly, everything I think I should be actively working on gets a card on my kanban board (I run Kanboard on a server) with the path to that project.

Recently, I have also added an Incubator folder, which is just notes on projects that are either not code or aren't ready to start work. That folder gets a nightly commit to a git repository on a server, so I don't need to think about it beyond adding thoughts.

Collapse
 
damirljub profile image
Damir Ljubičić • Edited

I keep them in
/backend/number - project name

Just because it makes sense for me to track my work in chronological order(since whenever I start new project, it gets a new incremented number).

Also, because I keep them directly on my disk root directory so it's easier to work with.

Collapse
 
shadear profile image
Shadear Bakr

I do it the same way it is a good way to organize projects IMO.

Collapse
 
dottxado profile image
dottxado

I divide projects in folders by technologies, so i have Symfony, WordPress, Laravel...and so on. I am a Mac user and i use Laravel Valet as server, and i prefer to not call each project folder with a too long name, because it will be the domain name for the project. I have an Archived folder where i move projects that i want in local just for convenience. I’m only missing a convention for “test” projects because they are creating a lot of mess 🤣

Collapse
 
nocnica profile image
Nočnica Mellifera

I like this because it’s something I’m very likely to remember about each project. I know which of my projects were in C and which Rails more readily than the year, the client, or anything else.

Collapse
 
danielmendes profile image
Daniel Mendes

I have two different location for my project, so I have my folder for php web projects in C:\laragon\www\and in my C:\users\personal\programmation\, I separate my project by languages and/or by frameworks, so I have folder's name like vuejs, nuxtjs, go, python etc and inside I have my projects.

Collapse
 
whitewcallum580 profile image
Callum White

On Linux, I use a projects folder in the home directory.
By project, I mean anything that should be grouped together. So a client and server application would both go in one directory, while a different directory could only contain a specific service that will be used multiple times.

Collapse
 
omigtito profile image
Miguel Machado Pacheco • Edited

D:\www\<enterprise>\<project>

Simple answer

Collapse
 
atomzwieback profile image
Atomzwieback

Most of the time i try to keep my projects clean and structured in folders. As im working on MacOS i keep my projects under /Users/Username/Developer/Private or /Work depending on the "work". But overall it escalates most of the time and then it looks like the image after a week of work and testing.

Burning Brain Spongebob

Collapse
 
emmanuelonah profile image
Emmanuel Onah

I am a Mac user and under my root directory,I create a folder called code and inside it I create folders like:

  1. nameOfCompany
  2. personalProjects/differentTechnologyProjectFolder

Etc

Collapse
 
yoursunny profile image
Junxiao Shi

My repository checkouts are in $HOME/code or %USERPROFILE%\Documents\code, except those tied to Arduino or similar specialized software.
I try to use a separate (remote) computer for each project.

Collapse
 
etienneburdet profile image
Etienne Burdet

I mirror Github: owner/repo (inside a /code folder).