10 Angular Project Structure Best Practices
If you're working on an Angular project, it's important to have a good project structure. Here are 10 best practices to follow.
Angular is a powerful front-end framework that helps you build single-page applications quickly and efficiently. But as your Angular project grows, it can become difficult to keep track of all the different pieces of your codebase. That’s why it’s important to have a well-organized project structure.
In this article, we’ll talk about 10 Angular project structure best practices that will help you keep your codebase organized and easy to navigate. By following these best practices, you’ll be able to more easily maintain and update your Angular project as it grows.
1. Create a separate folder for each feature
When your project grows in size, it becomes difficult to keep track of all the files and folders. Having a separate folder for each feature helps you to organize your project better and makes it easier to find the files you’re looking for.
It also makes it easier to reuse code. For example, if you have a login component that you want to use in multiple places, you can put it in its own folder and import it into your other components.
This structure also makes it easier to unit test your code. You can create a separate folder for your tests and run them independently from your application code.
Overall, using a feature-based structure will help you to keep your project organized, make it easier to find files, and make it easier to reuse and test your code.
2. Keep the app module as small and clean as possible
The app module is the root module of your application and it defines the Angular platform. It also contains all the other modules in your application, so it can get very large and complicated very quickly.
Keeping the app module small and clean will make it easier to manage, understand, and test your application. It will also make it easier to refactor your code if necessary.
3. Use Angular modules to group related features together
By grouping features together in modules, you can more easily reuse those features in other parts of your app. For example, if you have a user login feature and a user registration feature, you can put both of those in an AuthModule. Then, if you need to use the user login feature in another part of your app, you can simply import the AuthModule and have access to both the login and registration features.
This is a much better approach than having all of your features in a single module (or even multiple modules that are not related), because it makes your code more modular and easier to reuse.
4. Avoid circular dependencies between modules
Circular dependencies can lead to unexpected behavior, especially when the modules are loaded asynchronously. In addition, circular dependencies can make it difficult to understand the relationships between modules, and can make code refactoring more difficult.
If you find yourself in a situation where you need to create a circular dependency, try to refactor your code so that the dependency is only required by one module. If that’s not possible, consider creating a service that provides the functionality needed by both modules.
5. Don’t put too much logic in components
If a component contains too much logic, it becomes difficult to test and reuse. It’s also more likely to contain bugs. Therefore, it’s important to keep components as simple as possible and move as much logic as possible out of them.
One way to do this is to create services for specific tasks and inject them into the components that need them. For example, if you have a component that needs to make an HTTP request, you would create a service for making HTTP requests and inject it into the component. This way, the component can focus on its main task, and the service can handle the details of making the HTTP request.
Following this best practice will make your angular project more maintainable and easier to debug.
6. Make your services reusable
Suppose you have a service that fetches data from an API. If you only use this service in one component, then it’s not very reusable. However, if you make this service available to other components in your app, then you’ve made it more reusable.
Making services reusable has several benefits. First, it reduces duplication of code. Second, it makes your code more maintainable because you only have to update the service in one place. And third, it makes your code more testable because you can mock the service when testing components that depend on it.
7. Use smart and dumb components
Dumb components are those that are not aware of the global state of the application. They receive data from their parent component and they emit events to their parent component. They are also known as presentational components or leaf components.
Smart components are those that are aware of the global state of the application. They can dispatch actions to the store and they can subscribe to reducers. They are also known as container components or root components.
The main advantage of using smart and dumb components is that it makes your code more reusable and easier to test. Smart components are usually very small and they only contain the logic that is necessary for them to perform their task. This makes them easy to test. Dumb components on the other hand are very simple and they don’t have any business logic. This makes them easy to reuse.
8. Don’t use @Input() for one-way data binding
@Input() is used for two-way data binding, which means that the data flows both ways: from the component to the DOM, and from the DOM back to the component. However, one-way data binding only flows in one direction, from the component to the DOM.
One-way data binding is simpler and more efficient because it doesn’t require Angular to keep track of changes to the input data. This can be important when working with large data sets.
To implement one-way data binding, you can use property binding instead of @Input(). For example, if you have a component with an input property named “name”, you can bind to that property like this:
This will set the “name” property on the “my-component” component to “John”.
9. Prefer observables over promises
Observables offer a number of benefits over promises, including the ability to cancel requests, the ability to retry requests, and the ability to compose multiple observables together. In addition, observables are often used in Angular’s Reactive Forms module, making them a natural fit for Angular applications.
10. Write unit tests for every component, pipe, directive and service
Unit tests help you to verify that the individual units of your code are working as expected, and they provide a safety net that catches bugs before they make it into production. By writing unit tests for your Angular code, you can be confident that your code is doing what it’s supposed to do, and you can avoid costly and time-consuming debugging sessions.
Plus, when you have a comprehensive suite of unit tests in place, you can refactor your code with confidence, knowing that if any bugs are introduced, they will be caught by your tests.