Part 01 - Directory Structure of the Application

Source Code Files of this Chapter

project-root/
│── public/
│
└── app/

See the final project directory structure

project-root
├── app/
│   ├── Controllers/
│   │   ├── Api/
│   │   │   └── UserController.php
│   │   ├── AuthController.php
│   │   ├── EmailVerificationController.php
│   │   ├── HomeController.php
│   │   └── UserController.php
│   ├── Core/
│   │   ├── Abstract/
│   │   │   ├── Migration.php
│   │   │   ├── Model.php
│   │   │   └── Seeder.php
│   │   ├── App.php
│   │   ├── Bootstrap.php
│   │   ├── Config.php
│   │   ├── Database.php
│   │   ├── Env.php
│   │   ├── ExceptionHandler.php
│   │   ├── Mailer.php
│   │   ├── Request.php
│   │   ├── Response.php
│   │   ├── Router.php
│   │   └── Validator.php
│   ├── Helpers/
│   │   └── helpers.php
│   ├── Models/
│   │   ├── EmailQueue.php
│   │   ├── EmailVerification.php
│   │   └── User.php
│   ├── Queue/
│   │   └── MailQueue.php
│   └── Services/
│       └── EmailVerificationService.php
├── composer.json
├── composer.lock
├── config/
│   ├── app.php
│   ├── database.php
│   └── mail.php
├── database/
│   ├── Migrations/
│   │   ├── 2026_01_10_create_users_table.php
│   │   ├── 2026_01_18_create_email_queue_table.php
│   │   ├── 2026_01_18_create_email_verifications_table.php
│   │   ├── 2026_01_19_add_password_to_users_table.php
│   │   └── 2026_01_19_add_verified_column_to_users_table.php
│   └── Seeders/
│       └── UserSeeder.php
├── .env
├── .env.testing
├── .gitignore
├── migration.php
├── .phpunit.result.cache
├── phpunit.xml
├── public/
│   ├── adminer.php
│   ├── css/
│   │   └── style.css
│   ├── images/
│   │   └── welcome.png
│   ├── index.php
│   └── scripts/
│       └── app.js
├── queue.php
├── routes/
│   ├── api.php
│   └── web.php
├── seeder.php
├── server.php
├── tests/
│   ├── Bootstrap.php
│   ├── Database/
│   │   ├── DatabaseConnectionTest.php
│   │   ├── MigrationTest.php
│   │   ├── Seeders/
│   │   │   └── UserSeeder.php
│   │   ├── SeederTest.php
│   │   └── UserModelTest.php
│   ├── DatabaseTestCase.php
│   ├── Feature/
│   │   └── HomePageTest.php
│   └── Unit/
│       ├── ConfigTest.php
│       ├── EnvTest.php
│       ├── RequestTest.php
│       ├── RouterTest.php
│       └── ValidatorTest.php
├── vendor/
└── views/
    ├── auth/
    │   └── login.php
    ├── home.php
    ├── layout.php
    └── user/
        ├── edit.php
        ├── register.php
        └── show.php

The directory structure is the skeleton of the project. So the more standardized and understandable it can be, the project will be in terms of extensible, maintainable, and testable.

MVC-inspired Directory Structure

On this project, the directory structure is flexible and conventional. Which means you can create it the way you want. But since the PHP community has been using different directory structures in web development for a long time, some conventions have become well-known regarding the names and patterns of files and directories. For example, src, config, .env, public, index.php etc.

Our project will be like MVC and we will use PSR-4 through Composer for class autoloader.

Init Coding

So, let’s start to build the project-root directory first, then create public and app directory inside the project-root directory.

> mkdir <PROJECT_NAME>
> cd <PROJECT_NAME>
> mkdir public app

<PROJECT_NAME>: your project name, it will be the project-root directory.

public: the default accessible file of the project

app: all project related class will go here

⬇SOURCE CODE: Chapter 01