How I structure my react components
Tags: react, webdev, beginners
Published: 2022-02-14 12:27:07

React is all about components. Better structure helps you to easily debug your app, understand how the flow is going on and also as your project grows it becomes easy to manage everything. Now, React doesn't care how you structure your project and components. So in this blog, I am going to share how I structure my project and components.

## Let's get started

### Before we start
- In this article, I don't use any styling framework just plain CSS(sass).
- Also plain react 😅.

## File structure
_If you like this structure you can download it from [here](https://github.com/RakeshPotnuru/react-fast-template)._

Apart from configurations actual react project starts from the `src/` folder. So let's directly jump into it.

```bash
└── src/
    ├── app/
    ├── assets/
    │   └── images/
    ├── common/
    │   ├── Footer/
    │   │   └── components
    │   ├── Hooks/
    │   ├── Navigation/
    │   │   └── components
    │   ├── UIElements/
    │   │   └── LoadingAnimations/
    │   └── Util/
    ├── pages/
    │   ├── 404/
    │   ├── About/
    │   │   ├── components/
    │   │   └── About.jsx
    │   ├── Contact/
    │   │   ├── components/
    │   │   └── Contact.jsx
    │   └── Home/
    │       ├── components/
    │       └── Home.jsx
    └── styles/
        ├── _mixins.scss
        └── _variables.scss
```

I always separate client and server logic even for a small project because it helps to focus on one thing and it makes the project less messy. 

Quickly know what each folder contains:
- **app/** - This folder contains actual react app.
- **common/** - This folder contains components that can be used anywhere in the project.
- **pages/** - This folder contains all the common pages of the website.
- **assets/** - All the assets like images, audios etc.
- **styles/** - This folder contains global styles like Sass variables, mixins, functions etc.

### Let's dig deep

![PinguRobbyTheSealGIF.gif](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1644822315156/VfFUKBWvM.gif)

### Pages

```bash
.
└── pages/
    ├── components/
    │   ├── Hero.jsx
    │   ├── Hero.scss
    │   ├── CTA.jsx
    │   └── CTS.scss
    └── Home.jsx
```

![pages.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1644830401435/D5uDi2jeo.png)

So, here `Home.jsx` is a route and page. The idea is to imagine each page as a separate HTML file and it contains different sections as components.

### Common

```bash
.
└── common/
    ├── Footer/
    ├── Hooks/
    ├── Navigation/
    ├── UIElements/
    └── Util/
```

Common folder contains components that are used by other components like loading animations, custom buttons, custom hooks etc.

### App

The app folder contains the main app with all the features like the dashboard, profile page etc. So you can think app folder like the actual app that unlocks after login.

## Component Structure

Now let's take a look at how I structure a component.

### Naming 
Component name, the file name that contains the component, style sheet file name of the respective component will be the same. 

Here's how I structure a component-

![component struct.png](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1644837222157/L5K8uNk0N.png)

For example,
```jsx
import react, { useState, useEffect } from 'React';
import axios from 'axios';

import 'CompName.scss';

const CompName = (props) => {
  const [visits, setVisits] = useState(0);
  const [color, setColor] = useState('red');
  
  const name = "Cat";

  useEffect(() => {
    setVisits(1);
  });

  const someFunction = () => {
    // do something
  };

  return (
    <div>
      <h1>Visits: {visits}</h1>
    </div>
  );
};

export default CompName;
```

That's it! 

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Thanks for reading, follow for more 😇.