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How do you keep development projects on your PC organized?

Nočnica Mellifera on October 13, 2020

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?

Euan T • Oct 14 '20 • 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

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...

Christian Menezes • Oct 13 '20

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

Artem • Oct 13 '20

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.

Naman Gupta • Oct 14 '20 • 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.

André Michel Andy • Oct 14 '20

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.

ImTheDeveloper • Oct 14 '20

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.

John Colagioia (he/him) • Oct 14 '20

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.

Callum White • Oct 14 '20

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.

dottxado • Oct 14 '20

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 🤣

Nočnica Mellifera • Oct 15 '20

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.

Daniel Mendes • Oct 14 '20

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.

Damir Ljubičić • Oct 14 '20 • 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.

Shadear Bakr • Oct 14 '20

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

Emmanuel Chikwendu Onah • Oct 14 '20

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

nameOfCompany
personalProjects/differentTechnologyProjectFolder

Etc

Atomzwieback • Oct 14 '20

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.

Miguel Machado Pacheco • Oct 14 '20 • Edited

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

Simple answer

Junxiao Shi • Oct 14 '20

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.

Etienne Burdet • Oct 14 '20

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

Bad Practice • Oct 14 '20

JetBrains apps that work with GitHub directly. PhpStorm, WebStorm, IntelliJ, etc.